‘The Requin (aka From Below)’ Review
Stars: Alicia Silverstone, James Tupper, Deirdre O’Connell, Danny Chung, Kha Mai | Written and Directed by Le-Van Kiet
Opens with an oddly “fake” looking scene that feels like it was shot entirely on a green screen soundstage – which for all I know might be true, especially given the copious amounts of CGI featured in the film as a whole… Yes, we’re in CGI shark territory (combined with stock footage – how very The Asylum of this film) in this one folks!
The Requin, aka From Below, stars Alicia Silverstone [Sidebar; who would have thought we’d ever see Alicia Silverstone in a shark movie? Seriously?] as Jaelyn who, along with her husband Kyle (James Tupper) are on holiday in Vietnam following Jaelyn’s miscarriage. Of course, being a shark movie we know things aren’t going to go according to plan for the couple. Kyle gets injured whilst swimming, his blood pouring into the ocean waters like some sort of obvious foreshadowing, whilst Jaelyn has flashbacks to her miscarriage. Triggered by the sight of blood.
Then the villa the duo are staying in is trashed in a storm, leaving Jaelyn and Kyle in the ocean… Yes, the villa was washed out to sea along with its occupants. Oh, and guess what? The waters are apparently filled with sharks. I say apparently as the film is two-thirds over before we see ACTUALLY see a shark!
So what do we get is very reminiscent of the worst of these “trapped at sea” shark movies… Tons of footage of our two protagonists talking, suffering heat stroke and dehydration from being out in the open, and a myriad of shots of the sea and the sky. It’s the kind of padding that a lot of these kinds of films suffer from – when there’s not a big cast to focus on the film loses focus. And the fact that writer/director Le-Van Kiet hols back on the aggressors, the killer sharks we really want to see only makes the film suffer more.
I get that having a big name like Alicia Silverstone in your film, in more than a cameo (which will be a shock to folks who are used to people like Michael Madsen and Bruce Willis turning up in a film for 10-20 minutes and having their name of the film as a marquee) you want to make the most of her performance but sacrificing the appearance of the very sharks your poster promises to do that is a major mistake The Requin makes.
It also has two of the stupidest protagonists ever too. Like a lot of these films do, so at least Van Kliet is following a formula! How stupids you may ask? Well how about setting fire to your “raft” and having to abandon it for treading water in the ocean. THAT stupid! It’s ridiculous. One of the most ridiculous things anyone in ANY of the myriad of shark movies to have come before The Requin – Open Water, The Reef, The Shallows, Adrift – in fact, the stupidity is only surpassed by the ridiculous nature of films like Sand Sharks, Ghost Shark and Ouija Shark. Only those films KNOW they’re dumb. Dumb fun that is. Here everyone takes everything far, far too seriously.
But The Requin‘s biggest mistake? Well besides having an entire terrifying shark attack actually be dolphins? Well, much like Great White, which had a similar overly serious “dramatic” tone to its schlocky story, The Requin looks entirely like it was filmed on a sound stage in a giant tank of water (which it was, at Universal Studios Orlando reportedly). It’s hard to sympathise with what happened to our protagonists or empathise with them in their current predicament when everything looks so fake. This is shocking when you consider studios like The Asylum make films that look fake but still manage to engage with the audience. Yet here everything writer/director Le-Van Kiet gives us of his stranded couple seems to do the opposite! Which means that by the time we get to the shark portion of this film there won’t be many people left caring about what happens to Jaelyn and Kyle.
And you’ll care even less after the multitude of fake-out endings… Well, at least Alicia Silverstone can be praised for giving her all to something as sub-par as this. Without her name, star power and performance, The Requin would likely have ended up going directly to somewhere like Tubi!
*½ 1.5/5
The Requin is in cinemas across the US now from Saban Films and on VOD and digital platforms from Lionsgate. In the UK Altitude will release the film on February 21st under the retitle, From Below.
