Want to watch Alicia Silverstone fight the world’s fakest looking CGI shark?

The condemned: The Requin (2022)

The plot: This movie might consider it a spoiler to say that the ocean is not devoid of fish. Far be it from us to chastise people in a desperate situation, but watching people consistently make the worst possible choice in a life-or-death situation, over and over again, tends to lead a viewer to think, “Have these people never seen a movie where someone got lost at sea?” There are animals in the water. Just a head’s up, for the characters you’re about to meet.

The Requin follows married couple Jaelyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Kyle (James Tupper) as they begin their getaway vacation at a fancy Vietnam resort. They’re staying in one of those glamorous bungalows-over-the-water, the kind where you can dive off your back porch into snorkeling-friendly reefs. It’s pretty clear this isn’t just for fun, though; we meet Jaelyn waking up from a nightmare that looks like a horrible tragedy took place during her pregnancy when she went into labor, and her reference to having “another episode” lets you know she’s got some PTSD from the incident.

But after a phone call with her family to establish the lack of WiFi in the area, an awkward convo about the dangers of social media (thanks for the talking-to, movie), and a quick visit to a nearby tourism landmark so Jaelyn can be handed a little talisman “for good luck” by a local (ironic foreshadowing!), we get to the storm. A small tsunami lashes the resort and send Jaelyn and Kyle’s bungalow adrift, spinning out into the ocean. When they come to in the morning, they begin the process of hoping against hope that someone will see and rescue them.

Of course, not helping matters is Kyle’s bloody leg wound, which is always closed until the camera lingers on it, at which point it starts emitting seeming liters of blood into the water. If you’ve seen any ocean-set thrillers (read: one more movie than either Jaelyn or Kyle have seen, I guess), you know where this is heading: Sharks soon attack, and the pair are frantically trying to stay above water, out of the hungry maws of their predators, and in the direction of land. They do none of these things well. And when salvation (in several forms) finally does arrive, these two immediately fuck it up. It’s no spoiler to say somebody lives, but not for lack of trying to bring about the exact opposite result.

Over-the-top box copy: Nothing yet. The cover of the film bears the tagline “Terror will surface,” which isn’t bad, but it also features a shot of a massive shark about to sink its chompers into Jaelyn. Let’s disappoint the killer-shark movie fans right now—the majority of this film features no sharks. And when one does arrive, hoo boy; let’s just say the makers of Syfy’s schlock-at-sea mockbusters must be feeling pretty good about their CGI integration skills. We’ll come back to that.

The descent: Remember two sentences ago, when I said the thing about disappointing fans of killer-shark movies? That’s me. I’m that fan. The Meg? I was there at 1 p.m. the Wednesday after it opened, with no else but me and my partner in the theater. We had a fucking ball with that piece of crap. So if there’s a big shark movie out there, as long as it doesn’t look like intentionally cornball garbage (e.g. most of those Syfy movies), I’m going to be watching it. Fool me once, shame on The Requin.

The theoretically heavenly talent: While some will likely recognize James Tupper, a supporting player in TV series like (deep breath) Men In Trees, Mercy, Revenge, Aftermath, Big Little Lies, A Million Little Things, The Hardy Boys, and more, the star is Alicia Silverstone, who will likely never get a more iconic role than Cher in Clueless, but is nevertheless a fine actor in general. That is, until she came face to face with this film.

The execution: I hope you like scenes of a woman shrieking and/or groaning ineffectually at nothing, because that’s a good 25% of The Requin. Presumably, at some point the director told Silverstone, “Look, you’re the star, so the audience needs to hear you continually making noise, no matter the situation,” and she took that note to heart. I thought of making an audio clip stringing together all of her non-linguistic vocalizations, because it would probably be pretty funny, but A) it would just sound like an extremely NSFW podcast, or maybe someone really bad at ASMR, and B) it would have taken fucking forever. Rarely have I seen a decent actor so thoroughly defeated by subpar material.

The main takeaway, however, is that this is one of the most poorly green-screened films in recent memory. At no point does it look like the two of them are actually in the ocean. The background visibly jiggles in just about every shot, failing to match the camera movements, and it’s not even worked into close-frame images well. Take a look at this shot of the ocean through the opening in the bottom of their floating bungalow—it’s so poorly rendered in relation to the practical scenery, it really puts the “floating” in floating bungalow.

There’s probably an alternate reality in the multiverse in which this column just descends into my posting clip after clip of the dreadful CGI and laughing. In fairness, it’s hard not to, not when we get establishing shots like this:

Of course, that’s probably still preferable to such effective establishing shots as this following one. I wonder if we’re… still in the ocean? Seriously, count the seconds that tick by on the second shot, your jaw will drop.

Honestly, after awhile, watching this started to feel like laughing at the guy who keeps walking into glass doors and looking startled that they’re there. Sure, it’s hilarious, but you begin to worry there’s something actually wrong with them.

So instead, let’s laugh about some of the other choices this film makes! THERE ARE A LOT. But thankfully, a good chunk of them fall into the “that’s incredibly dumb in a fun way” camp. For instance, Kyle’s behavior, prior to his crippling leg injury that eventually lures sharks to his delicious lower half: He’s here to prove to his wife how much he cares and supports her. So naturally, when a massive wave knocks her over the side of the bungalow during the tsunami, he grabs her arms, holds her fast to keep his beloved wife from being swept away to her death, and then… decides that would be the perfect moment to let go, start waving for help, and yelling haplessly at no one in particular. It’s great:

If I were Jaelyn, I would’ve waited until the first moment he turned his back after this, and then bludgeoned him with a rock.

Look, I get it; no one’s making the best decisions when they’re floating on a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean with a gaping leg wound and approximately 48 gallons of blood from it chumming the water. But even with that caveat in place, the choices these people make are TBS Very Funny. For example, when the sharks finally do arrive to menace Kyle and Jaelyn, the initial attack is fended off by Jaelyn grabbing a piece of bungalow floorboard and slapping the water with it—classic terrifying stuff to a shark. But when the predators release his leg and he pops back up, Kyle grabs his wife and yells, “”Paddle! Hurry!” Paddle… where, exactly, Kyle? 30 feet to the left in the middle of the ocean? Good plan.

It’s a shame the film turned out like this, a low-budget clunker not that far removed from a Syfy original. The director is Lê Văn Kiệt, whose previous film, Furie, is the highest-grossing Vietnamese film in that country’s history, and reportedly a pretty solid martial-arts actioner. Maybe something got lost in translation, or maybe he’s a director without a facility for CGI; whatever happened, this movie looks bad, and pulls bad performances out of normally reliable actors Tupper and Silverstone. Of course, when your climactic shark sequence pulls a move like this, I’m not sure there’s any way it could’ve recovered, unless someone in the effects team was hoping to at least wring a few unintentional laughs from the movie:

Yes, this movie literally jumps the shark.

Likelihood it will rise from obscurity: Dim. In a world populated with movies like The Shallows, The Reef, 47 Meters Down, and more, one that straddles the line between attempted quality and so-bad-it’s-good doesn’t succeed at either.

Damnable commentary track or special features? Sadly, no, because I would love to just listen in as Alicia Silverstone watches The Requin from start to finish and talks about it. I suspect most of her thoughts she’ll be keeping to herself.