Floundering
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is an intentional oxymoron in this instance. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Of course, children are little bullshit detectors, incorruptible and wise when they sense someone trying to offer them crap while calling it fudge.
DreamWorks might counter that Shark Tale, with its casting of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, isn’t intended for children at all. This isn’t an excursion into the land of fractured fairy tales, like Shrek or its superior sequel. (This movie’s codirector, Vicky Jenson, made her debut on Shrek.) There’s nothing sweet or endearing about Shark Tale, no warmth compensating for the clinical, cold, computer-generated animation. In fact, it’s stunningly violent (for a movie ostensibly created to sell Happy Meals and action figures and bathtub floaties), kinda racist (all the Italians work for the Mob, all the African-Americans live in squalor) and cynically crass (if you believe that Katie Couric wasn’t cast as newscaster Katie Current for some free publicity for Today, perhaps you also think Coca-Cola and The Gap received their plugs gratis).
A little fish named Oscar (Will Smith) dreams of escaping his graffiti-covered undersea ghetto and movin’ on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. Oscar works a crap job at the whale wash, scraping tongues and chatting up his lovestruck best friend, Angie (Renée Zellweger), whose affections he doesn’t notice. On the other side of the reef, De Niro’s Great White Shark Don Lino is putting the protection squeeze on whale-wash owner Sykes (Scorsese) and trying to teach his softie vegetarian son Lenny (Jack Black, playing Italian but sounding vaguely Irish) to be a killer.
Turns out Oscar’s been borrowing money from Sykes, who needs the money to pay the don, so Sykes has his Rastafarian jellyfish goons (Doug E. Doug and Ziggy Marley) torture Oscar when he can’t pay up. The scene of the two translucent stoners zapping Oscar is torture enough; like most of the movie, it’s played for laughs that never materialize. But what makes it especially irksome is the use of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” on the soundtrack; Ziggy even joins in. The movie thrives on these dirty details: the black eye Oscar sports after the jellyfish get hold of him, a shrimp begging Don Lino for its life by explaining that it’s raising his dead sister’s crippled child, a homeless and deranged crab that lives in a dumpster.
First-time screenwriter Rob Letterman can’t muster the energy or smarts to put his handful of pop references in context. It’s enough, apparently, to parody The Godfather and The Untouchables for the umpteenth time and merely set it underwater, or to have Will Smith shout, “You had me at hello” at no one in particular while Zellweger’s character raises a pitying eyebrow. (And it’s just embarrassing to hear Scorsese shout, “Raise the reef!”) It’s stunning to consider how much time and expense went into something so chintzy and dull — a script full of non sequiturs shouted by a screen full of chum.
