It should come as no surprise that Roboshark is really, really stupid. It's another in the long line of Syfy movie of the week mashup shark films - it's got some heavy competition up agains the Ghost Shark and Sand Sharks of the world. And it goes the Sharknado route of being a little too in-the-know about how stupid it is, dialogue along the lines of "This feels like one of those Syfy movies of the week!" and "This isn't a comedy... is it.?" That being said, it's hard to me to totally hate on a film featuring a billionaire computer developer named Bill Glates.
The story (as it were) goes like this: A (surprisingly decent-looking) alien spaceship shoots a little orb into the ocean, where a great white gobbles it up. It is immediately transformed into a (unsurprisingly crappy-looking) Roboshark - honestly, it looks like a cartoon. It then does what you would expect a roboshark to do - attacks a nuclear sub, and then goes into the waterways beneath Bulgaria - er, I mean, Seattle - to randomly pop up out of the ground and attack people.
The human elements in our tale are a reporter named Trish, her husband Rick, and their daughter Melody. Trish is a veteran reporter who is starting to resent being relegated to reporting on cheesy/fluff stories. But while she's out on her latest assignment, she sees some military activity in a park, and her spider sense starts tingling. And luckily for us, she's got her stoner-esque cameraman along to provide some comic relief. And hubby Rick just happens to work for the government, and just happens to be in charge of monitoring the waterlines Roboshark is using to commute around the city. Some military bigwigs move in to Rick's office to take out Roboshark, but Rick sticks around to help them while secretly giving out info to Trish for her big story. And Melody is just sort of along for the ride - she skipped school or something? Anyways, she's the tech-savvy one, who uses the power of social media to help Trish make the Roboshark story into an unstoppable media phenomena. But will they get too close to Roboshark and pay with their lives?
You can probably guess, but I won't spoil it. But I still don't suggest watching it. Roboshark would be a fine movie to have on while you are doing something else, or napping - the very concept of the thing is silly enough to watch for a few minutes on a lark.
But to actually try and judge it as a movie is very tough, because I don't think it's even trying to be. You get the idea that the folks behind Roboshark are just trying to fill whatever meager requirements there are to make a SyFy movie of the week. Prominently featured gimmicky monster? Check. Extreme overracting? Unfunny forced comedy? Check. Periodic deaths of recently introduced characters? Check. I mean, with these films it's almost enough to just have footage that will be serviceable enough to distribute. Beyond that, the hook is in the brand and whatever the mashup title is.
What bugs me the most about Roboshark is how little effort seems to have gone into the shark attacks. You could hope for something decent (he does have rows of rotating razor sharp teeth, after all), but what you get here is mostly bloodless and just plain weak. Often times they just cut away from the attacks, or the victim just disappears. I'm sure it has more to do with a lack of budget, but it's frustrating considering how even just a splatter of blood here or there would have spruced things up. And of course it's a given by this point, but the Roboshark character has no real weight and seems to change size on a whim - but it's a little easier to take here than in some other SyFy films because the design is so overtly cartoonish.
There is also the obnoxious presence of social media in the film. Little text messages and tweets show up onscreen like a T-Mobil commercial, and the Roboshark universe seems to operate under the assumption that getting followers on Twitter and views on youtube is the most important thing in the world. (Although I suspect that may be becoming depressingly accurate.) But Melody (reporter Trish's daughter) is conveniently some kind of techno-wiz (because aren't *all* kids nowadays?) and manages to not only get her mom major coverage on social media, but also to track Roboshark when the US Navy can't figure out how to.
I guess you can make the argument that the writer-director Jeffery Lando (who seems to be a SyFy journeyman of sorts) is at least trying to make things a little more fun than usual. Bits and pieces of the humor do land (the afore mentioned Bill Glates thing still kind of makes me smile), and some of the characters are appealing when they are not overacting.
But criticizing something like Roboshark is almost pointless. It's called Roboshark, for crying out loud. It's cheap crap, but it makes money. SyFy has clearly stumbled on a formula that works well enough, and I can't blame them for running with it. So whatever. Roboshark is certainly not worth watching, but it's not quite as soulless and crushingly bad as some other SyFy offerings.
I would not recommend this film.
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