Reef, The (2010)
Horror | Thriller

Tagline: The dream vacation is about to become a nightmare.

Pray that you drown first On the beautiful but dangerous waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, ship delivery man Luke and four friends sail a yacht through paradise. Along the way, their ship is torn open by sharp rocks and begins to sink, leaving the passengers with a terrifying choice: stay on board with slim hope of rescue, or swim twelve miles to the nearest island - through a sea of bloodthirsty, unseen danger. When they enter the water, a relentless Great White immediately follows their trail for a white-knuckle chase that will fill the waters with blood! From the director of the acclaimed monster hit Black Water comes a pulse-pounding, visually stunning thriller that never lets go until the final, heart-stopping scream!

Storyline: Luke welcomes his friend Matt and his girlfriend Suzie that come from London and Matt's sister and Luke's former girlfriend Kate that comes from Sydney to sail with him and the sailor Warren in a sailboat. However, the vessel hits an underwater rock and capsizes with an opening on her bottom. Luke advises that they should swim in the north direction to reach the Turtle Island, in Queensland, Australia, while they have strength since there is a current moving the boat in the opposite direction of land but Warren prefers to stay on the hull waiting for help since there are sharks in the water. The quartet swims, but they are hunted by a great white shark. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on July 29, 2011 -- Every subsequent shark attack film has to deal--somehow--with the challenge of escaping the looming underwater shadow of Jaws, the gaping-mawed great granddaddy of them all. Deep Blue Sea differentiated itself by going for a sci-fi angle, with a submerged research facility and genetically modified killer makos. 2003's Open Water, shot on off-the-shelf DV cameras, took the vérité route, with a distressingly realistic portrayal that feels, at times, like an improbable documentary. And then there are the films like Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, which throw realism overboard in favor of prehistoric predators leaping out of the water to take down airplanes or bite a chunk out of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was curious, then, to see how Black Water director Andrew Traucki's latest creature feature, The Reef, would try to distance itself from Steven Spielberg's iconic Amity Island monster movie. Traucki's approach is to pare down the shark attack film to its basics. There's no Moby Dick-style hunt, no real backstory, no extraneous drama or character development. Here's what the film does have: a big, scary-ass shark, a terrified group of floating castaways, and an endless expanse of ocean. What more do you need?

As it turns out, you need a bit more, but we'll get to that in a second. This is a film about the sheer man vs. nature fight for survival--nature, naturally, survives best--and it wastes no time in getting straight to the core disaster scenario. Luke (Damien Walshe-Howling) seems to have the best job in the world. He makes a living delivering yachts across the globe, and for his latest jaunt--from Australia to Indonesia--he's invited his best friend Matt (Gyton Grantley), who brings along his girlfriend, Suzie (Adrienne Pickering), and his sister, Kate (Zoe Naylor). Luke and Kate clearly have a history together--we learn she once helped him crew a yacht to the Mediterranean--and there's blood-thick sexual tension between the two from the get-go. As a present, she brings him a giant phallic sausage, which is funny until you realize the real symbolic foreshadowing--to a shark, humans are nothing more than encased meat.

There are other hints of what's to come. In a boating shop at the marina, the store owner catches Kate looking at a wall of mounted shark jaws and tells her, "You're more likely to die from a bee sting than get killed by a shark." Not in this movie, buddy. Along with shaggy-haired Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith), Luke's latest crewman, the two couples set off for a deserted island paradise, where they snorkel and frolic and give each other sexy looks. The next morning, however, while traveling through a reef, their yacht capsizes, leaving them stranded atop its overturned hull. They have a decision to make--do they sit and hope for rescue while the boat drifts in the current and slowly sinks? Or, do they brave the 10-mile swim to the nearest island?

This is very much a "What would you do?" sort of film, and there are several junctures where you might feel inclined to yell at the characters on screen. (Don't go after the errant flotation device! Don't investigate the mysteriously unmoving sea turtle! And, for the love of life--literally--stop splashing!) The group eventually splits. Warren, feeling cowardly, decides to stay with the ship, while the others paddle off into the blue unknown on boogie boards and wearing wet suits, knowing full well they look like seals from below. And you know the rest. Clearly, this isn't going to go well, and not everyone--if anyone--is going to make it. The situation is not unlike the set-up of Open Water, a movie that was ruined for me by the overly chatty dialogue and cringe-worthy acting. Traucki avoids those two particular pitfalls well; his script is the very definition of economic, and the actors are suitably believable, terrified--most of the time--into speechlessness.

The director gets a lot right. There are moments of unsettling eeriness, like when Luke explores the semi-submerged cabin of the upside down yacht, with dish towels floating ominously in the dark water and strange knocking sounds coming from outside the hull. And there are sequences of almost sublime tension, where you'll be gnawing on your knuckles waiting to see what happens next. Traucki handles the attack scenes brilliantly; instead of opting for mechanical or CGI sharks, he filmed real Great Whites off the coast of South Australia and composited the actors fairly seamlessly into the footage. The image of a large shark drifting out of the deep blue darkness is a visceral one--a palpable reminder that humans, out of their element, aren't quite at the top of the food chain.

Like sharks themselves, The Reef is streamlined and single-minded. It doesn't muck around with subtext. It has no need for developed relationships or a story beyond "stranded swimmers, hunted down one after another." At a lean 88 minutes, it's a svelte, highly evolved piece of genre filmmaking that wants to ruin your next beachside vacation--and Australia's tourism industry--with nightmares about what lurks beneath the waves. But that's about it. Traucki gives us lingering dread and sudden scares, but what he doesn't deliver is a reason to invest in the characters or their fates. Luke and Kate's history is given only a cursory treatment, and we know next to nothing about Matt and Suzie, who, let's face it, are merely shark fodder. The film is good at what it does--namely, hand-wringing terror--but ultimately, it feels insubstantial, more of a cinematic snack than a meaty, survival thriller meal.

The Reef is an efficient monster movie that has some great scares and a few moments of nigh unbearable suspense, but it's also a bit too streamlined for its own good. Still, my thoughts about shark movies in general align with my philosophy of zombie films--even the merely mediocre ones are usually fun to watch in the moment, even if they don't leave you with much to chew on later. If Shark Week is your favorite stretch of basic cable summer programming, you'll probably have a blast with The Reef.

[CSW] -2.4- The first half was pretty slow, but when the suspense hit. Since this is supposedly based on a true story then my biggest complaint that they did not show the shark enough is probably a result of the true story narrative. I wanted it to be a horror / thriller instead of a suspense movie. So if you want to see a great suspense movie but a lousy horror / thriller movie this one is for you.
[V3.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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