Touches You

Boring

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I've seen about maybe 20 shark movies and this is definitely in the top 5. It's not The Best Movie Ever. But it is definitely worth your time and I might even watch it a couple more times eventually.Every shark movie has its unique ridiculous goofy moment, as you likely know if you're reading reviews of a shark movie. This movie's memorable moment is pretty much a shark's worst nightmare, I'd venture to guess. I don't think it's been done before. Pretty amusing. But that's just one cute moment. The majority of this thing is pretty serious, not campy. There's tons of character development and they even spend some time giving us backstory on the main few people, and making us feel bored & familiar with the grocer where they get trapped, because a disaster feels more intense to us in the audience if we can relate. It's well worth the time to make things feel real. I think it helps for us to see the store going through its daily grind before we see it flooded with water & sharks. The horror is exacerbated for most of the characters because this store is their familiar everyday turf, and suddenly it's all different. Really there seems to be a theme of seeing the familiar with new eyes or something. Like I honestly think there might be a metaphor level to this plot. Realistic settings, people and dialog, and a plot that has some thought put into it? That's pretty good stuff for a creature feature!!The FX were nice too. The tsunami and the sharks felt really real yet still impressive.I am almost tempted to give it ten stars because for what this is, it's really quality stuff. Shindler's List it ain't, but it's a really good fun shark adventure.

Director Kimble Rendall turns out a rather respectable creature feature. Think of the beach and one sees pretty people surfing and swimming, children building sandcastles, starfish and seashells being sifted from the sand by curious vacationers. And yes, in the back of your mind is someone yelling...SHARK! Josh (Xavier Samuel) and his fiancé Tina (Shami Vinson) plan to move from Australia to Singapore after their nuptials. A freak shark attack kills Tina's brother (Richard Brancatisano). Josh is wrought with guilt for not being able to save the life of his best friend; Tina leaves. About a year later Josh is working in an underground grocery store and runs into Tina, who has returned with her new man. Unfortunately a huge tsunami hits and floods the store trapping many inside with a special guest...a Great White Shark. Survivors will have to band together for ideas to outlive the haphazard starving twelve foot predator. CGI shark attacks are gory. Danger lurks as the terror reaches fever pitch.Also in the cast: Julian McMahon, Dan Wyllie, Alice Parkinson, Cariba Heine, Alex Russell, Damien Garvey and Phoebe Tonkin.

"Bait" is a bad shark movie without enough ridiculous moments to become entertaining for that badness. When those moments come, they are pretty darn ridiculous, but not laughably so, for example:the movie opens with a shark attack that is perhaps the least realistic or frightening example of such a scene since the rubber shark in that '60s Batman movie. The standard doesn't improve much from here.the movie involves a tsunami that leaves people stranded in a flooded supermarket, stuck on top of shelves to keep out of the water, and stuck inside their cars in a parking garage. When the flood hits the garage the cars are completely submerged, and yet the people within them remain dry. When they got those cars, did they pay extra for submarines too?in what is still probably the movie's best scene, a heroic Asian man suits up in a makeshift diver's costume, weighing himself down with cans of food taped to his legs, and protecting himself from shark attacks with metal cages over his body. Most improbable yet, he has a snorkel he can use with a long hose allowing him to breathe underwater. Apparently they just found all this stuff floating around. If you were in a flooded supermarket and had to take shelter on top of a shelf, exactly how much diving equipment do you think you would find out of sheer luck?The movie quickly gets boring and derivative, up until the sharks, for there are actually two I believe, are dispatched in equally ridiculous ways: an underwater shotgun blast for one, a taser electrocution for the other. Tasers are designed to incapacitate people, and yet they can kill great whites? And shotguns work under water?

A tsunami hits the Queensland, Australia town of Oceania, killing scores of people & bringing devastation to the town. In a supermarket, several survivors – the supermarket's owner & three of his employees (one of whom was a former lifeguard), a young shoplifter & her police officer father, two young couples (one of whom is trapped inside their car in the underground car park), a security guard & two armed robbers – emerge from the water, seeking refuge on the shelves. They discover that the building's exits are blocked but that is not the worst of it – a pair of great white sharks are prowling the aisles, picking off anyone foolish to enter the water.If you thought that the Asylum-produced cult flick Sharknado was the most ridiculous killer shark film ever to grace the screen, then you've probably never heard of Bait, an Australian-Singaporean joint production which came out in 2012 & tried to replicate the basics of JAWS, only with lesser effort & in 3D.Whichever way you look at it, Bait suffers from a real stinker of a script. The premise is ridiculous to begin with – sharks hunting people through a flooded supermarket – although the poor disaster-movie plotting & contrived plot devices really nail this one in the groin.The film frequently swings silly plot devices that don't work, no matter which way you try to rationalise it – one survivor tries to wade past the sharks by using an improvised shark cage made of supermarket trolleys & with food cans for weights in order to deactivate the power switch (this scene made me unable to contain my laughter); several attempts to escape that don't end well (namely one example where the store's owner tries to climb into a duct, only to lose his grip & get bitten in half by the shark); the idiot couple that spend their time bickering in their submerged car over such inanities as not charging their cell phones (even if they worked, their reception would have been nonexistent since the tsunami would have knocked out cell phone towers in the area) & whether the woman's Gucci shoes are real or not. The climactic scene with Xavier Samuel taking on the shark with only a Taser pistol is nowhere even near the stature of Sheriff Brody's standoff with the shark in Jaws but it does have some funny element to it.Some of the actors do a good job with the slight material they have but others are just plain idiotic. And I never understood how an overloaded car battery can blast a hole in a fence in order to provide a way out.