Renny Harlin's latest needless addition to the action genre was advertised (in Australia, at least) as the "$100 million blockbuster of the millennium." If I were still back in my film student days I'd no doubt be trying to pad out a 3000 word essay about how significant it was that a film company would use the simple fact that a film was expensive as a marketing tool. However, for better or worse, I am no longer a film student, and I can simply observe that even the advertising guys were clearly at a loss as to how to market this deplorable mess.

I was eager to see this, despite knowing full well it would be bad (a self-destructive impulse Hollywood seems to have come to rely upon). After all, I'm a huge fan of Spielberg's original, unsurpassable, undeniably classic shark movie Jaws, and any movie that can even fleetingly recall some of the pleasures of that masterpiece is welcome. Interestingly, though, the film only occasionally emulates Spielberg's 1975 film. Instead it plagiarises much more recent sources: it is essentially, a direct rehash of Spielberg's far inferior monster movie Jurassic Park, with a little of James Cameron's Titanic mixed in. I can only assume the theory is that by plagiarising from two of the highest grossing movies ever, at least some money could be made.

The setup, while grossly implausible, could have been fun: a group of scientists are trapped in a half-flooded undersea laboratory, and are pursued by genetically enhanced super-smart sharks. However, there is almost no area in which the film's execution is adequate. I don't care what anybody else says: Harlin still can't direct. Like Michael Bay, he does a good impression of an action director: lots of quick cuts, big explosions, and - for horror - moments where things spring out suddenly and surprise us. But there has never been, and still isn't, any actual craft in his moviemaking: his most enjoyable film, The Long Kiss Goodnight, seems more and more to have owed its success to Shane Black's screenwriting and the cast's charisma. Here, though, the script is awful, offering neither wit, action, or even a veneer of credibility. The performances range from terrible (Saffron Burrows sulks her way from start to finish) to uninspired (excellent actors such as Samuel L. Jackson, Stellen Skaarsgard, and Jacquelyn McKenzie sleepwalk through).

All of the above we could have predicted. What astonished me, given the film's budget, was the lacklustre shark effects. I don't mean the animatronic effects: the creators of the robotic sharks in fact deserve kudos for a job very well done. Unfortunately, the film also makes use of incredibly bad computer generated effects. With one or two exceptions, every CGI shot in the film is poorly done. The sharks don't look real, they don't move realistically (they swim backwards in a couple of scenes, and seem jet propelled when they do move forwards), and they have not been well incorporated into the shots. It seems that computer effects have actually regressed since Jurassic Park made the first real stab at computer generated animals.