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Movie Review: Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus

The fine folks at Asylum followed up their blockbuster hit, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, with another stellar production:

Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.

Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus

I'm thinking that the Mega Shark might be the American answer to Godzilla.  Or not.

MSvC, as I'll subsequently abbreviate the title,  stands unique among films in that it pits Steve Urkel, The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, some dude that kinda looks like Pierce Brosnan but isn't, and some actress I've never heard of against a pair of poorly rendered monsters.

Jaleel White Will Never Live This Down...

Steve Urkel plays  U.S. Navy Lieutenant Terry McCormick who specializes in sharks.  He's on the USS Gibson (a nod to Debbie Gibson's role in the original MSvGO), trying to confirm the death of the Mega Shark, when it shows up out of nowhere and sinks the ship (possibly a commentary on the state of Gibson's career...).  McCormick loses his girlfriend in the carnage, and is the only survivor of the attack.  McCormick has developed some sort of sonic widget that can either attract or repel sharks, depending on what the screenwriter needs it to do at any given point in time.

Not Pierce Brosnan plays Nigel Putnam, a soldier of fortune in Africa who specializes in ghost hunting.

At First Glance, He Might Fool You. Then He Speaks...

Or killing strange animals.  Or something.   Putnam gets into the act when some random tall, blond lawyer lady approaches him in a bar in the Congo and asks him to kill whatever it is that's been eating the workers at a mine nearby.  They fly into the area, and the lawyer lady (inexplicably dressed in a short, tight dress and heels despite being in the jungle...) gets eaten by a giant crocodile (Crocosaurus, duh).  The croc also tries to eat Putnam, but somehow he manages to tranquillize the thing from inside its mouth, and it spits him out and falls asleep.  I was wondering why he didn't try to rescue the lawyer lady at that point, since she was swallowed whole and probably hadn't been digested yet.  Maybe he just doesn't care much for lawyers.

The actress I've never heard of (and I'm using the term "actress" kind of loosely) shows up at McCormick's debriefing, and offers him a chance at some closure by joining a team that is trying to hunt down and kill the shark.  This is Special Agent Hutchinson.    She looks very severe, and speaks in short, clipped sentences, and may actually have been carved out of a block of wood.

That Look On Her Face - It's Like A Mask!

About halfway through the film, she takes off her suit jacket and spends the rest of the film in a tight tank top.  This, I suspect, is a strong hint of why she's in the movie at all.  I imagine that somewhere in development, someone realized that the movie failed to meet the SyFy Channel's MCR (minimum cleavage requirement), so they added the character of Hutchinson to cover that.

Anyway, Hutchinson works for Admiral Calvin, played by The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager.  Calvin's main motivation for killing the shark appears to be so that he can smoke the most expensive cigar made.  Personally, I don't get it, but by the time they introduced that plot point, I was willing to go along with whatever they said.

This Movie Really Needed A Doctor. A Script Doctor...

Back to Putnam.  He manages to somehow get the sleeping croc onto a freight ship, along with some eggs.  (Eggs?  Where did eggs come from?  There weren't any eggs before.  It's like when the development staff realized they were low on cleavage, they also decided to add in some extra random plot points because the plot wasn't already convoluted enough.)  For some inane reason, Putnam wants to take the croc and its eggs to the U.S.  Why?  Really, why?  Does he want to corner the market on croc-skin accessories for the ladies?  Didn't he see King Kong?   Doesn't he know that bringing giant, vicious creatures to a densely populated city is a sure way to send said city to hell in a handbasket?  Whatever the reason, the shark begins to attack the boat. (nit pick:  both the shark and the croc tend to randomly change scale throughout the film.  At one point, we're told that the croc is 1500 feet long.  The croc is slightly longer than the shark.  The shark, early on, sinks a U.S. Navy Battleship, which is ~900 feet long.  The shark is clearly much shorter than the ship.  Yet the dorsal fin of the shark is shown to rise out of the water higher than the mast antennas on the battleship.  It's like the monsters are made of Expand-o-Foam.)  During the attack, the croc wakes up and escapes.  The boat sinks, and Putnam barely escapes.  He washes ashore and heads to a bar, where he meets Hutchinson, who recruits him to help with the burgeoning creature eradication effort.

Back on Admiral Calvin's aircraft carrier, we learn that McCormick and Putnam know each other from back in their Peace Corps days.  Or something.  It's really not well-explained, and by that point in the movie, I was finding myself wishing that the cast would break into a Bollywood-style musical number or something because everyone was so tense and serious.

The rest of the film is spent on a confusing trans-oceanic relay race trying to get ahead of the croc and the shark.  Why is the shark after the croc?  Well....

So those eggs that randomly turned up a while back?  As it happens, giant sharks are attracted to the smell of giant crocodile eggs (I mean, who wouldn't be?), and the giant crocodile just happens to have some "evolutionary adaptation" that enables it  to lay gajillions of eggs whenever the plot needs it to.  (giant pet rock: ham-handledly abusing evolution in order to give some magical characteristic or ability to an organism, even a monstrous one, is one of the reasons that a lot of people don't accept evolution.   I certainly don't expect a movie like this to get science right, but when they don't bother to try to explain anything else, but throw evolution under the bus, it just ticks me off.)

Anyway, yeah.  Sharks like eggs, and the croc has been cruising all over the oceans laying eggs.  Oceans.  Plural.  Somehow these giant creatures are also endowed with warp drive, because they go from Florida to California to Hawaii in the space of what seems like minutes.  And Admiral Calvin's carrier seems to have the same capabilities, because it just happens to be wherever the monsters show up.   I'm sure there's a deleted scene that explains that.  They probably cut to get the cleavage ratio up.

Right.  Well, McCormick, Putnam, and Hutchinson spend a lot of time in this adorable little 4-rotor helicopter, chasing the critters around and coming up with ineffective ways to try to kill them, including:

• Missiles
• Bombs
• Harsh Language
• Nuclear Subs (EPIC FAIL:  The shark swallows the submarine.  Whole.)
• Glaring Menacingly
• Trapping Them In The Panama Canal And Blowing It Up (Leads to random shark-on-land scene as it chomps its way back to the water, like some weird gray toothy Pac-Man.)

The Canal Scheme doesn't work, although it does manage to get the shark and the croc engaged in tooth to tail combat, where again all sense of consistency of scale is sacrificed in the interest of extra beer money.

They take the fight to Hawaii (I think.  Hell, by this point in the movie, they could have been on Mars for all the sense it made), where the croc eggs are starting to hatch.  A lucky slap of the croc's tail knocks the Urkelcopter out of the sky, injuring everyone and giving McCormick flashbacks of the shark attack that killed his lady-love.  McCormick and Putnam, with a renewed sense of urgency, come up with the Greatest Freakin' Plan Yet To Kill The Giant Monsters!

1. Take an inflatable motor boat out to where the monsters are fighting in the ocean
2. Drop McCormick's Amazing Sound Generator into the water, tuned to "Create Volcanic Eruption"
3. Lure the shark, croc, and half a gajillion baby crocs to the site of the impending eruption
4. Get the hell out

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Meanwhile, off camera, Hutchinson has regained consciousness and gotten the Urkelcopter back in the air, and she arrives just as McCormick and Putnam beach their motor boat.  They jump in the aircraft and get off the ground just as the volcanic eruption/nuclear explosion (remember, the shark ate a nuclear sub...) goes off, crisping all the critters in the blast.

Hutchinson finally cracks a smile (and it looked genuinely painful) as she reports that the shark and the croc are toast, and then flies off into the sunset.

Hokey smokes.

I never, in a million years, would have guessed that I'd watch a movie of which I can honestly say that Steve Urkel's acting was the unequivocal high point of the film.

Really.

-Jay