Shark Attack 2, or Shark by Numbers

Shark Attack 2 (2001) Directed by David Worth

Just when you thought it might be safe to go near water, here comes Shark Attack 2. Now, after Raging Sharks you might think I’d keep away from bad shark movies, but I didn’t stumble into Shark Attack 2, I actually sought it out. Why would I do that? One reason: Thorsten Kaye.
While I will admit that watching the occasional soap opera is a guilty pleasure, I refuse to apologize for wanting to see a movie with All My Children’s Zach Slater because Thorsten Kaye deserves to be a movie star. He’s got a certain smarmy charm that is just begging for a good action/adventure film where he plays a loveable roguish archaeologist. I hope he gets that film one day. In the meantime there’s Shark Attack 2.
The completist in me was tempted to start out by watching Shark Attack before moving on to the sequel, but that movie "stars" Casper Van Dien and that should be enough to drive me away. Even the presence of Ernie Hudson can’t make me go out of my way to see that. But Thorsten Kaye is another matter.
I’ll have to admit that I did have a bit of a shock when I realized that Shark Attack 2 was produced by NU Image, the folks who would go on to make Raging Sharks. I had a bad feeling when I saw Danny Lerner’s name flash up on the credits as a producer. If the sharks in Raging Sharks were just a recycling of the best of these sharks—well, that was a possibility too horrible to dwell upon for too long. The fact that the opening shot of the film is the same flying over the water shot that would be later used in Raging Sharks did not bode well for the rest of the movie, but my worst expectations were not to be realized.
Instead, Shark Attack 2 is like a compendium of all the elements that have gone into every other shark movie that has come before it. It’s like the Rosetta Stone of shark movies. And like the real Rosetta Stone, it isn’t very entertaining.
The movie begins with the introduction of two unnamed women who are diving on a shipwreck. The underwater footage isn’t bad, the shipwreck is a good visual and the real shark footage is decent. Then the shark makes its move and one of the women is attacked while the other one pulls a knife to try and fight it off in the course of which she manages to take out one of the shark’s eyes. The close-ups of the white teeth in this sequence are actually well done and quite frightening, mostly because they stay true to the Jaws Principle, which states that the less you see of the shark the more frightening the glimpses you get of the shark will be. Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not follow this principle.
Meanwhile we are treated to Key Shark Plot Element #1: Revenge. The woman who survived the shark attack was Samantha Peterson (Nikita Ager) and the woman who was killed was her sister Amy. (A sideline here: the back of the DVD says that the character’s name is Samantha Sharp. Whenever there’s a discrepancy like this it means one thing: the person who wrote the copy not only didn’t see the movie, they might even have just been guessing what the movie is about. Which begs the question: why do these people have jobs? I could do that job just as easily as the schmuck they’ve got.)
So, we jump to a week later (just a week?) and we see Key Plot Element #2: The grand opening of an aquatic park. Michael Francisco (the greasy & obviously villainous Danny Keogh) is rushing forward with the opening of Water World (which looks like a pet store aquarium), but he’s going head to head with his best marine expert Dr. Nick Harris (Thorsten Kaye). Just to reinforce their differences we see Francisco drive up in his Mercedes Benz and the first time we see Nick he’s underwater—in his element, as it were. And of course Francisco has to commit the obligatory blunder of revealing what an ass he is early by registering a scientifically dumb complaint about something. (Why is the tropical tank empty? Because the water’s too cold and the fish would die. Doh!) This is also where we meet the good scientist Morton, who walks around with a limp and a walking stick, sort of like a nerdy good-natured Ahab. Morton, like many of the other actors has been dubbed over from the original actor’s voice—because apparently South African accents aren’t mellifluous?
The most horrific example of this is in the scene on a dock in a suburban neighborhood where a couple of kids are playing with a radio-controlled boat and their voices sound like they were supplied by the same people who do the American voices for the Pokemon gang. I don’t know who those people are, but I really wish a shark could eat them and their annoying voices. Meanwhile, back to the film. The radio-controlled boat is attacked by the one-eyed shark. Authorities are alerted and our hero Nick is called in to get the shark out of the inlet. But Francisco wants him to capture the shark and bring it back to Water World for their grand opening. This is a bad idea that’s as old as The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Maybe older.
So Nick goes to his friends, The Miller Brothers who have a boat called the Wet Dream, which predictably has two girls in bikinis partying it up onboard. And like a real wet dream the fantasy ends with the girls dumped off the boat in favor of an actual paying gig with a vicious shark that would rather go after the boat than the bait. This then gives us a chance to hear the grizzled sizing up moment: “Looks like a twelve footer.” “No, this one’s sixteen.”
So, the shark comes back to Water World just in time for the grand opening. But the shark has one eye and that brings in the vengeful woman who sneaks in like a ninja assassin and attempts to gun the shark down with her shotgun. Nick stops her and the romance begins.
Opening day brings the mayor of Cape Town, Mayor Shandu, who was apparently named by George Lucas and of course Francisco decides to give the crowd a treat by having the shark fed in front of the crowd. This task is left to a poor schmuck named Kenny who throws a hunk of meat attached to a rope down into the water. Meat goes on the rope, meat goes in the water, rope follows meat, bad idea to not watch where the rope goes especially if you’re standing in the middle of it. Kenny gets dragged into the water and the shark ignores the dead meat and goes straight for the live flesh. That’s right. They killed Kenny. Meanwhile the shark makes a break for it because the gate to the sea was open. Morton closes it in time to force the shark to have to batter it down in an embarrassingly poor understanding of marine biology. Nick apparently ran out of tranquilizers so his only hope is to make a slow-motion running javelin throw to get a transmitter onto the shark. It’s just like Chariots of Fire, only there’s a shark and the javelin looks like it bounces off the shark.
With a killer shark on the loose Francisco puts the blame on Nick, fires him and brings in an arrogant Aussie adventurer/Discovery Channel faux Steve Irwin named Roy Bishop (Daniel Alexander) to catch the shark with his impressive boat, the Down Under. That leaves Nick, Samantha and the Miller Brothers to go after the shark as a rival team. Unfortunately for them the Wet Dream’s engine starts smoking (just like the Orca) right after Samantha took a few shots at the shark with her shotgun.
But Crocodile Dundee comes back with a mangled shark and everyone feels safe—safe enough to go on with the obligatory big surfing competition the next day.
Then comes an impossibly silly romantic montage sequence where Nick and Samantha spend a day going to all the romantic places in Cape Town, taking a skyride, feeding squirrels, standing at several attractive vistas. That night they discover a whole cave full of sharks (What is it with this fear of sharks hunting in packs?) and that they’re the offspring of the sharks from a genetic mutation experiment (presumably what Shark Attack 1 was all about).
Mayor Shandu (who has a big portrait of Nelson Mandela behind his desk) must ask himself “WWNMD?” and sends Roy Bishop to check out the cave while Francisco convinces him that the competition must go on—because this may be the only chance to get people naked on the beach of Cape Town.
Greedy capitalism is, of course, very wrong and the pack of mutant great whites wreaks havoc on the surfing competition (killing the less annoying of the Miller brothers and severely wounding the other one) but not before we get a glimpse of a topless woman sunbathing and reading a magazine because apparently that’s what people do when they go to see surfing competitions.
Now it’s time for some payback and Nick, Samantha and Roy team up to get the mutant sharks. (Roy is getting revenge for his lost crewmen Hootie and Pierson.)
Then we get the obligatory showing of the shark scar and the old shark story. This is the one really shining moment of the film because Nick’s speech about a childhood shark attack represents the philosophical great leap forward since the time of Jaws and it’s the one reason why, as shark movies go, Jaws is slightly retrograde. Because in Jaws the shark isn’t just a primal killer, it’s a force of evil in a world meant for humans. It’s vicious and must be destroyed. It’s a battle of two species who cannot co-exist.
But the new philosophy of sharks is that they have a right to be left to live as they are meant to live, and that it is only when we interfere with them—when we sin against nature and corrupt it in some way—that the result is a monster that must be destroyed. That’s why we have all these movies about mutant sharks. It’s because we can no longer simply vilify the shark for being what it is—in fact it’s even hard to fear the shark simply because it can kill us. Our real fear, as it is in many monster movies, is the perversion that we humans inflict on a nature that, if not benign, is at least the way things are and (perhaps) should be. Is it even possible for us to have a simple shark movie where there’s a shark that kills people and that must be hunted? Maybe not—not without having some sympathy for an animal that has no recognizable specific motivation for viciousness. In the Jaws films there was always a sense that this great white had become evil when it had acquired a taste for humans, but even then it was a natural development. Here, the real villains are the scientists of Shark Attack 1 who screwed around with shark DNA and the venal money-worshippers like Francisco who will do anything for a buck without regard for either human or animal life.
Does any of this make Shark Attack 2 a better aesthetic experience than watching Jaws?
No. It’s mostly a collage of the elements of other, generally more interesting shark movies. But philosophically, Shark Attack 2 is a step forward because it represents a conscious desire to set the record straight—to stop blaming sharks for being sharks, even in a shark movie which in essence trades on the primal fear of sharks many of us have.
It might be worth saving this film, just for that message. And Thorsten Kaye? I hope he gets another better film soon, but in the meantime there are a couple of moments in here that give us a glimpse of a great actor and that, too, might be a good reason to take a look at this one.

Special Features: Trailers
Shark Attack – This may be about as much of the first Shark Attack movie as I could stand. Ernie Hudson? What happened to you, man?
Shark Attack 2 – This might be about as much of Shark Attack 2 that most other people can stand.
Octopus – If you’ve seen Raging Sharks (Why, though, really?) then you’ll recognize some of the underwater shark (now I suppose Octopus) POV shots in this trailer. And it’s a film about a giant octopus that’s going after a submarine named the Roosevelt, same as the sub in Raging Sharks. And for some reason even the trailer seems to cut off abruptly--one can hope that the movie doesn't just cut to a freeze frame of an octopus mouth.
Crocodile – It’s spring break and some college students looking for swampy debauchery (there’s nothing like a marsh to get people naked and drunk) are about to be terrorized by a giant killer crocodile. The croc effects actually look good and the film is directed by Tobe Hooper. Might be worth seeing if you’re tired of watching Friday 13th or Jaws and want to see a new monster and new victims.