Dead in the water

Noel Vera

Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson and Rob Letterman's "Shark Tale," about
a fish (Will Smith), who falls afoul of a group of mobster sharks
led by Don Lino (Robert De Niro, in his umpteenth gangster role)--
well, let's just come out and say it, this is Dreamwork Animation's
attempt to cash in on the popularity of "Finding Nemo." Dreamworks
executives must have scratched their heads when rival studio Pixar
announced its next project--an animated film about a little fish,
taking place almost entirely in water (a notoriously difficult
element to animate, traditionally) and with such a lame title. The
movie's subsequent critical and commercial success must have left
them so green with envy they had to throw together something to show
that, yes, they too can do a fish movie…just jam in as many
celebrities as possible to make sure it's a real success, use plenty
of pop songs, and--hey presto! "Nemo 2."

Not exactly. I'm no big fan of "Nemo" myself--never really warmed to
the rather bulbous marine faces and sentimental story--and frankly,
I think Stephen Hillenburg's "Spongebob Squarepants" TV series
(about the adventures of an aquatic sponge with rectangular
trousers) has funnier, more freewheeling jokes. But "Nemo" got one
thing right--it gave you a proper narrative, with fairly well-
developed characters you come to identify with and like, and jokes
along the way that were genuinely funny (at least they got me
chuckling, on occasion). "Shark Tale" opens promisingly, with
fascinatingly detailed animation--the underwater Times Square is
chock full of location and product parodies (or plugs, if you like),
some of them actually amusing, while the whale wash assembly line,
full of grimy, colorfully encrusted baleens being scrubbed and
rinsed and turtle-waxed, is worth a tour all by itself--but for some
reason the characters never really gain more than two dimensions,
and the story never goes beyond second gear. Oh, there are fast-
moving action setpieces aplenty, but what animated film doesn't have
one (Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," come to think of it--but he's
in a class all by himself, of course) nowadays?

What you end up with is ninety minutes' worth of spot-the-celebrity
and guess-the-reference, which palls after about, oh, twenty minutes
(you know an animated picture is in trouble if you find yourself
looking at your watch, or getting up to stay awake--which, come to
think of it again, I find myself doing more and more with recent
animated fare). And the choice of movies the movie refers to is lame-
-not that "The Godfather" or "Jaws" are poor films per se, but that
they've been parodied forever, practically ("The
Freshman," "Piranha," almost any other episode of "The Simpsons").
I've seen Cartoon Network shows with more inventively esoteric
allusions--an entire episode of Maxwell Atom's "The Grim Adventures
of Billy and Mandy," for example, based on Frank Herbert's science-
fiction novel "The God Emperor of Dune."

Will Smith works his likeable persona hard--more than he should, or
deserves to--as Oscar, the enterprising fish who accidentally
becomes known as a "Shark Slayer;" problem is, he has the attitude,
but not the lines (some of which are lifted off other movies
anyway); the rest of the cast-- Renee Zellweger as Angie, the love
interest; Angelina Jolie as Lola, the temptress; Jack Black as
Lenny, Don Lino's vegetarian son; Doug E. Doug and Ziggy Marley as
Bernie and Ernie, a pair of sadistic Rastafarian jellyfish; the
criminally wasted Peter Falk as a flatulent Don Brizzi; and Katie
Couric, playing a newscaster named (duh) Katie Current--stay pretty
much in the sidelines, trying not to go adrift in the overbusy
emptiness.

Easily the most enjoyable of the voice performances--and maybe the
single element that can keep you awake and sane while you sit
through this dull, dull affair--are Robert De Niro and Martin
Scorsese, hamming things up as shark and blowfish, respectively. You
need to know something about the two, of course, that for a time
(from "Mean Streets" to perhaps "King of Comedy") they were one of
the most excitingly creative actor-director collaborations around
(since they separated, it seems, both of their careers have gone
somewhat adrift, De Niro's more than Scorsese's); it's a keen
pleasure to see De Niro, complete with telltale mole and belligerent
jawline, parody his various performances in "Taxi Driver"
and "Goodfellas," and for thick-browed, motormouth Scorsese to keep
up with him. Exchanges like:

De Niro: "I tell you what's what, and what?"
Scorsese: "What?"
De Niro: "What 'what?'"
Scorsese: "What 'what' nothin'. You said 'what' first."

--are funny not so much for what's said, but for the actors' rapid-
fire delivery and the sense that this is possibly how they talk
during a shoot; there's the additional pleasure of seeing De Niro
terrorize Scorsese who, by all accounts, own a pair every bit as big
and brassy as De Niro's. Bigger, maybe--he's a filmmaker, after all,
one of the better ones still living.

The movie climaxes (skip this paragraph if you plan to see the
picture--though why you'd want to bother, I don't want to know) with
Don Lino chasing Oscar through the whale wash, in an attempt to kill
him (but dons never do their own killings, as anyone who's seen
the "Godfather" movies can attest--rather, they "push a button,"
hire someone else to do the job); Oscar traps Don Lino in the wash,
forces him to confront his vegetarian son; Don Lino has a change of
heart, and relents in his vengeful quest. What--Robert De Niro's Don
Lino has a change of heart? The man who played Travis Bickle, Jake
La Motta, Rupert Pupkin, Jerry Conway has a flash of coherence, a
moment of serenity, a pang of conscience? You just know the moment
was dictated more by plot function than by any inherent sense of
drama--it's nearing the ninety-minute mark, after all, time to wrap
things up, however unconvincingly…

It would be nice to call "Shark Tale" the worst film of the year,
but the movie doesn't even have the energy or conviction to try for
that lofty status (there's plenty of competition, believe me). It's
a gaudy mediocrity stuffed full of talents, underperforming
enormously; it's a fish gone belly-up weeks before that no one's
thought enough of to take out of the tank, and the corpse is
starting to smell.

(First published in Businessworld, 10/8/04)

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