Shark Tale

People may view the standard that Dreamworks is in now to be their most embarrassing period, going from a studio that rivaled Disney producing more adult-oriented content, to devolving into the very thing they were originally striving to not be, most of their recent films haven’t been the most impressive things (somehow The Boss Baby got nominated for an Oscar in spite of everything). However, the signs arrived much sooner than people might’ve thought they did, and that would be with the creation of the 2004 CG-animated picture, Shark Tale.  Shark Tale was conceived around the time when DreamWorks was still having their casual feud with Disney; with their movies often feeling ‘’remarkably similar’’ to Pixar movies being released around the same time. Eventually this problem was put aside, and DreamWorks found their own style, but this was one of the last big comparisons picture as this movie was being created around the same time that Pixar’s Finding Nemo was being made. Thankfully, the obvious differences came from more than just surface level and story purposes, as Finding Nemo was a touching emotional movie that is still held in high regard by children and adults alike, while Shark Tale reminds people that DreamWorks could fall incredible low and even arguably started the wave of bottom-feeder movies they would eventually start to make more of. In an underwater city populated with several different aquatic creatures, a fish named Oscar (voiced by Will Smith) is a super energetic, but low-hanging guy who wishes to be up in the big city but is stuck down in the bottom feeder’s area working his days away at a whale wash. Despite getting the chance to improve his life, he throws it away on gambling which results in his boss, Sykes (voiced by Martin Scorsese) leaving him for dead after failing to pay him back from the loans he’s given him. When he’s almost eaten by a shark, an anchor kills it and saves his life, but due to no one seeing what happens, everyone in the city believes that he is responsible for the act. Becoming a huge celebrity and renamed as the Shark Slayer, Oscar is eventually approached by Lenny (voiced by Jack Black), a shark who doesn’t want to be a shark and, after learning about his little secret, agrees to help keep up the lie so that he can start a new life as a non-fish eater. Eventually discovering that Lenny is the brother to the dead shark and that their father, Lino (voiced by Robert De Niro) is the leader of the shark and wishes to end him for good, Oscar has to decide whether it’s more important to be famous with his rich girlfriend, Lola (voiced by Angelina Jolie) or return to the simple life with his friend Angie (voiced by Renee Zellweger) who secretly has a crush on him. In terms of their movies, it hard to pretend like Shark Tale isn’t one of their lowest moments in all of DreamWorks’ history, containing very little redeeming qualities and actively spewing with several faults that range from disgusting dated elements, hateable characters, a boring storyline, and absolutely hideous visuals.

Not that needing an extra look at this paint splash of a movie is necessary because that alone will give its audience a pretty good indication of what to expect, but Shark Tale is a movie that was mostly hated by critics but found great success at the box office and with kids, even earning itself a video game in the same year as well as somehow earning a nomination at the Oscars for Best Animated Feature (the fact that this was in even the same category as The Incredibles is a little insulting). This movie is a mixture of so many dueling elements that just can’t work together which results in a movie with little identity and little lasting impact, acting as a template of several dated elements that no longer house any weight and various story and character cliches that have no charm backing them up. It’s a plot written by screenwriters, Michael J. Wilson, and Rob Letterman, that strangely feels like it could be turned into something a bit more interesting if handled with better quality, but it’s far away from that level here. This almost mafia-esque storyline maybe could have functioned with DreamWorks’ more adult-oriented system like what Antz did originally by telling a mostly adult story in the fashion and pace of a kid’s film, but when the movie features animation and humor this specifically kid-oriented, that really doesn’t clash with the slow-moving, very talk-heavy plot that this movie has, made even worse by the fact that it’s just written terribly with lame conflicts, hollow character arcs, and truly painful dialogue. It’s one level incredibly boring, the other level incredibly annoying, and these two pieces just don’t mesh at all thanks to how horrendously this movie has dated. The plot would still be a mess, but the movie’s issue with being so CLEARLY stuck in the late 90s/early 2000s results in a lot of painful puns, terrible lines, pathetic dialogue, and no sense of timelessness, so even though the movie had additional dialogue added by Scott Aukerman, Alec Berg, Sean Bishop, BJ Porter, Jeff Schaffer, David P. Smith, David Soren and Lona Williams and still has dialogue this bad, that’s a real bad sign. The film’s directors, Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron and Letterman, have been attached to better things in the past, but none of that talent seems to come out in this movie. The story does get a few positives pinches for at least being unique in concept and handling the ‘’liar reveal’’ plotline in a little less painful than usual, but outside of that, it’s just a generic telling of a different idea which leaves the movie feeling confused and aimless, leaving most of its hopes on its writing and on its voice cast.

This movie surprisingly has a lot of famous names in its line-up and all of these people have shown off their talents in other famous movies and even other DreamWorks movies, but a lot of talent can’t always save a product if you have nothing to work with, and its evidently clear when your dialogue is just ‘’90s catchphrases and pop culture references’’ that you won’t be able to save anything. In terms of actual acting, no one is honestly bad; they voice their parts fine, it’s just on a structural and character level, these roles are so shallow, so unoriginal, and so horribly unlikable that it doesn’t matter who you get to voice them. The character of Oscar is so unlikable in this movie and so poorly realized that it honestly felt like they thought of the image of Will Smith as a fish before the thought of what his character should actually be like (which works out a little bit because the character is just Will Smith as a fish, no other characteristics at all).  This kind of fast-talking smooth-guy routine is something that has already been done to death (especially by Will), but mix that with a selfish goal, tons of jerky moments and very little redeeming features, it strange how DreamWorks thought people would want to watch him and not wish for him to be served up with chips. Considering he’s a character that is supposed to want to be a rich person yet is played and essentially acting out by an incredibly rich successful actor, it never feels genuine or matches what the role requires, it’s just a terrible character. People like Angelina Jolie and Renee Zellweger are pretty pointless (with their characters having truly disturbing designs and really low standards if they actually have any interest in that rotten scale of a main character), the villains feel wasted even with De Niro feeling right at home with the role, Scorsese is an interesting choice for the character of Sykes as it never feels genuine, Jack Black has a really annoying voice, and most of the other voice’s actors are just offensive stereotypes or just ear-grating voices.

All of these problems are strong factors as to why this movie doesn’t work, but it is overlooked the giant elephant in the room, that being that the key flaw of this film is that is it just plain ugly. It’s so ugly and painful to look at and everything around how this film looks visually just adds to the uncomfortable and dated atmosphere it created for its. Outside of a Whale Wash as opposed to a car wash, the environment feels lazy, barely established as a unique environment, and incredible generic. The colors strangely feel off in certain aspect, like its muted in certain elements and over-saturated in others, and the character designs are the stuff of nightmares. Weirdly enough, the sharks don’t look too bad in comparison to the rest of the characters (maybe due to the simplicity of their structure mixed with the limited ability to cartoonishly morph their bodies limiting the number of terrifying restructures), but the fish looks absolutely disgusting. There’s nothing inviting or comforting about anything of these character, they just look like CG abominations with their actors faces smeared into them. There’s a ton of faces that will be nightmare-fuel for many people (especially with the lead that just looks putrid anytime he comes on screen). The writing is about as lazy and dated as it could be, it’s nothing but catchphrases, pop culture references and 90s slang, it’s not even trying to hide how obviously dated it’s going to be in the future. When you don’t have anything substantial to say in writing the story or characters and your humor is solely based around a certain time-period, chances are that only people who grew up in that time period are going to care about the movie after this. That mixed with an awfully dated soundtrack and visuals that look even worse than some of the earliest CG animation, it leaves a pretty ugly stain on the picture overall.

If there’s any property that sunk DreamWorks’ credibility pretty low, it would have to be this movie. DreamWorks has had its duds every once and a while and this movie technically isn’t the worst movie that they’ve had (a certain movie about a racing snail still holds that title), but its most definitely a close second and makes even some of these lesser movies look a little better by comparison (The Boss Baby is lame and entirely unneeded, but it tried a little harder than this). It’s a movie that lacks a distinct identity and the image it does have is purely based around dated material and generic direction of a weird, yet boringly handled idea. Even outside of that, the characters suck, it’s a dull sit packed with too many references that aren’t trying to be clever, the music is dated and lazy, and while DreamWorks would grow into much better movies and it seems to have a special audience of children who grew up with it, nostalgia-goggles aside, this movie leaves itself dead in the water. Clearly everything is not alright with this film.