Oil
drilling in the Louisiana bayou causes a hungry bull shark to get loose and
chomp down on a bunch of swimmers. A
down-on-his-luck fisherman (Lou Diamond Phillips) is hired by his ex-wife oil executive
(Kristy Swanson) to do a survey of the area.
They cross paths with a drug dealer (Coolio) who’s looking to recover
some stashed loot from a deal gone sour.
He takes them hostage to look for the money and soon they run afoul of the hungry shark.
Red
Water starts off with a bang when a beautiful bathing beauty gets eaten by the
shark. Director Charles Robert Carner (who
also wrote Gymkata, Blind Fury, and Christmas Rush) delivers a decent jump
scare during this sequence, which lead me to believe this was going to be a
better than average SYFY Channel Shark movie.
Once the dull drug dealer subplot (not to mention the even duller oil
drilling subplot) takes over, things get awfully tedious. I guess Carner is trying to say that humans
are just as deadly as man-eating sharks, but the way he does it his ham-fisted
at best.
When
the shark is front and center, Red Water is a watchable effort. Although the shark attacks are few and far
between, the shark effects themselves are pretty good and Carner knows how to
set up a severed hand gag with the best of them. Sadly, the stuff on dry land is
interminable.
The
cast is better than the film deserves.
Phillips plays things very seriously, which feels a little out of
place. It’s as if no one told him he was
starring in a SYFY Channel movie.
Swanson does a fine job in the thankless role that requires her to be both
Phillips’ ex AND the face of the corporate villain. Coolio gets by from basically playing
himself, although you wish the script gave him more zingers.
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