Dark Tide (2012)

 
Dark Tide (2012)

4/10

Starring:
Halle Berry
Olivier Martinez
Ralph Brown

Directed by: John Stockwell

Does Dark Tide qualify as a movie to see?

The answer to that is a sad NO! This movie lacks everything that could make it worth your sit-down time. The problem is that after you’ve been drowned in the dialogues and tossed around by some guy who thinks risk is fun, the movie pretty much has nothing more to offer, making you, the viewer, leave the cinema hall indifferent and pretty sure you just saw a documentary-like movie, thinking more of itself than you of it.

Released on limited screens, watching it myself, I can see why this would not have been worth the distribution money for a wide release. This tragic thriller follows a tale of Kate Mathieson (Halle Berry), who was a renowned documentary host for swimming with Great White Sharks.

After the tragic death of her mentor, she hung up her swimming suit and spent her days giving mundane wildlife tours to anyone who pays. Her old partner Jeff (Olivier Martinez) shows up later, after being paid by an adventure-seeking father and son, to convince her to take them to swim with the sharks.

Now I’m not the one to call a movie script dumb (well, that may not be totally true), but this script feels so weak and lame that I was wondering why any of the producers thought they had an a good enough script, worth rolling out the production carpet for. The plot was too thin, and there little to know character development or depth.

Halle Berry for me acted the best in this movie, everyone other person casted also did their average best, but add up their form of excitement to be in this movie, and still, you are short of the needed thrill to save this movie from being, meh!

Dark Tide is directed by John Stockwell, who also directed the waste of film reel Into the Blue in 2005, which starred Jessica Alba and Paul Walker.

Production of Dark Tide was done in South Africa and shot for six weeks on a small boat with real Great White Sharks. The underwater camera work was impressive, that I must add, and the film had really nice continuity as the underwater scenes don’t seem too far from what is actually happening, so you are not feeling like the movie cut off from one scene to another, kudos to the editing.

But if you have seen this movie, I’d like to know what you made of it, because I cannot for the life of me recommend it to anyone.