Director – James Nunn, Screenplay – Nick Saltrese, Producers – Nadine Luque, Andy Mayson, Andrew Prendergast, Chris Reed & Mike Runagall, Photography – Ben Moulden, Music – Walter Mair, Additional Music – Austin Dickinson, Paul Landon & Neil Rumney, Visual Effects – Lipsync Post (Supervisor – Adam Buckner, David Fowler, Tony Willis & Kaze Andy Yau), Production Design – Paul Burns. Production Company – Altitude Film Entertainment/Picaro Films/Freebie Films/Lipsync/Richmond Pictures/Saban Films/Square One Entertainment.
Cast
Holly Earl (Nat), Jack Trueman (Tom), Catherin Hannay (Milly), Malachi Pullar-Latchman (Tyler), Thomas Flynn (Greg), Manuel Cauchi (Mexican Beggar)
Plot
A group of five university friends from Kansas are in Mexico on Spring Break. On their last day there, the guys decide to steal two jet skis and go joyriding. However, while pranking around out at sea they collide. One of the jet skis is sunk and the five are forced to cling onto the remaining ski, although its engine has been damaged in the collision. At the same time, they realise there is a shark lurking in the water.
Jaws (1975) created the Killer Shark Film. It spawned three sequels and a great many imitators. By the late 2000s, these had graduated to the deliberately ridiculous with the likes of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and the cult bad movie hit of Sharknado (2013), followed by a whole host of imitators. This same period also brought a growing body of killer shark films that take a survival horror focus and feature people stranded in shark-infested waters – see the like of Open Water (2003) and sequels, The Reef (2010) and sequel, The Shallows (2016), Adrift (2017), 47 Meters Down (2017) and sequel, Great White (2021), and the lesser budgeted likes of Swim (2021), Maneater (2022), The Requin (2022), Shark Waters (2022) and The Black Demon (2023).
Shark Bait is down the lesser budgeted end of these shark survival films. It also ends up being a film where director James Nunn misses most of the opportunities. The production makes an appeal for the American mainstream and features American college students on spring break in Mexico. Despite this, all of the cast are British and the film was actually shot in Malta. As soon as we are introduced to the quintet partying and their dismissive treatment of a legless local, we begin actively disliking the characters.
And when it comes to the actual scenes with the group stranded at sea, the film is a bit lacking. For one, the film has five characters (although numbers are gradually whittled down through the course of the story) who are trapped on a jet ski. This is a vehicle – at least the one seen in the film – that is roughly around the size of motorcycle. So when you have a floating platform, which is probably no longer than a two-seater couch, with five people clinging to it while the entire drama is contained there, the dramatic possibilities seem limited.
Trapped on a water ski in shark infested – (l to r) (on the ski) Thomas Flynn, Holly Earl, Catherine Hannay; (in the water) Jack Trueman and Malachi Pullar-Latchman
Usually films like these build a tight rollercoaster out of slim hopes raised, possibilities grasped and then dashed – both the abovementioned The Reef and The Shallows are superb examples of this done right – but James Nunn never gives us much of that. The script has the group trying to repair the engine and variously getting picked off by the shark. Characters swim off to a nearby yacht and a flashing beacon in the water but these never amount to much dramatically. There are assorted shark chomping scenes, the best of which is one where Thomas Flynn is snatched by the shark and Holly Earl gets dragged away too after her hair is caught up in the wristband of his watch.
Shark Bait was the seventh film for British director James Nunn. Nunn previously worked as an assistant and second unit director, most notedly on 47 Meters Down and its sequel. He first directed the thriller Tower Block (2012). He went on to make assorted direct-to-video films such as Green Street 3: Never Back Down (2013) and the action films Eliminators (2016), The Marine 5: Battleground (2017), The Marine 5 Close Quarters (2018) and One Shot (2021), all of which are non-genre works.
