This pulpy yet weirdly woo-woo nautical thriller sets good-guy treasure hunters on a collision course with drug smugglers (bad guys) and great white sharks (morally neutral but still voracious). It’s like the plot was dreamed up by a hack who overheard his six-year-old pitting Lego figurines against one another. You start to expect that any minute Batman or Unikitty will join the fray which – frankly – would be an improvement. What we get instead is tired, cliche-riddled dialogue and bizarre flashbacks in which lead good guy Cassie (Scout Taylor-Compton) remembers how her oceanographer grandpa (Richard Dreyfuss!) encouraged her to face her fears in the water after she witnessed a great white kill her father when she was a kid.
Now an adult and an expert diver, Cass has returned to the same coastline where daddy got munched, this time with her husband, Gregg (Callum McGowan) who is looking for a shipwreck. Gregg’s old friend Benz (Stuart Townsend) is the captain of the ship they have hired, along with a first mate and some disposable supporting characters who end up as shark bait when feeding time begins. That happens because the ship is overtaken by a bunch of ex-Navy Seals (led by a charisma-free Jon Seda) who press gang Cass, Gregg and the others to dive for some sunken drug parcels.
The score goes heavy on the low notes of doom and fake blood starts to fill the water, though there’s not a lot of suspense but plenty of gore and torn limbs. At least the sharks themselves are pretty convincing, a lot more so than old Bruce from Jaws which Dreyfuss starred in. As if in atonement for giving great whites a bad rep all those years ago, Dreyfuss himself delivers a little Ted Talk over the closing credits in which he extols the beauty of sharks, their significance to the ecosystem, and their resilience given they’ve survived so many extinction events, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. This charming little lecture earns the film an extra star rating even though the rest is largely dross.
• Into the Deep is on digital platforms from 27 January and on DVD and Blu-ray from 3 February.
