QuickFlick: Shark Night 3D

1.5 Stars Out of 5

After a three year absence from her Louisiana lake house, Tulane student Sara (Sara Paxton) returns with six friends to find that the lake she once knew has changed for the worse — it’s now infested with sharks. Shark Night 3D, like most other thriller movies, has the audience on their toes waiting for each character to meet their bloody fate.  However, Shark Night’s PG-13 rating ensures the graphic violence is kept to a minimum, disappointing those who were anticipating buckets of gore.
On the way to Sara’s secluded lake house outside of a small fishing town, the lead and her friends encounter Sara’s ex-boyfriend Dennis (Chris Carmack) and his not-so-friendly sidekick Red (Joshua Leonard). Red roughs up the gang and sets off an uneasy tension between the two groups. Once on the island, Sara encounters Sheriff Sabin (Donal Logue), a local law enforcement officer who is friendly but not that helpful.
The sharks in Shark Night 3D are vicious CGI creatures, but they do not stack up to the scare quality of past Hollywood sharks such as the titular monster in Jaws. The antagonists are identified in the film after a wakeboarding accident, which kicks off a race to help the injured Malik (Sinqua Walls) survive while the other six characters struggle for their own lives. Despite the fact that the characters in the film go to a prominent university, they are still clueless enough to still get in the shark-infested water, where they are obviously not able to out-swim or out-maneuver the ruthless sharks.
Like most horror movies, the fast-paced music and underwater shots are a dead give-away to preceding events. The deaths of the students are not shocking, mainly because the PG-13 rating limits any noteworthy bloodshed. The love subplot does not give Shark Night 3D any additional emotional depth whatsoever; it only adds to the predictability of the scheme and characters of the film. The idea of love gone wrong assists in the film’s plot structure, but is almost immediately identifiable. The 3D effects do not add anything extra to film, except for the occasional shark-out-of-water scenes that do little to frighten the audience.