The Reef

To be honest, this film is basically a very poor rip-off of Finding Nemo....

and is no where near as good, funny or entertaining, nor is the animation up to the same standard.

The plot is roughly the same, although this time he doesn't go after his parents - even the voices sound alike!

I really recommend that you don't go and see this film - even little kids who have seen other animated films (such as Finding Nemo, Shrek, Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, Madagascar, etc) may turn up their nose at this one.

I have seen this film with my brother back in 2006, when I was 10 and he was 6. My dad brought this film from a video-club, not even looking what it is (typical for him, he just asks "Is this a film for kids?" and if it is, he takes it). When I saw the cover, I knew it will be a bad film, but I put it in and watched it anyway.

The film is about a fish named Pi. He lives in Boston with his parents, who are starting to think should they leave Boston and go to a tropical reef, where Pi would be safe. Both of them are caught in a fishing net, and Pi is saved by some porpoises. They bring him to the tropical reef his parents were talking about.

Next, he sees Cordelia, a pink female fish, being taken photos of by some divers. Pi immediately falls in love with her. There are some fish around her, and among them he finds his cousin, Dylan. There, he learns about the inhabitants of the reef. He learns about "flatbottom" (the open ocean), and that all the fish avoid it, because fishing isn't forbidden there, and there are numerous fishing nets.

Soon after, a bully shark Troy (oh, how original name) appears on the scene, with his two pals, a barracuda and an eel. Troy kisses Cordelia, and Pi unsuccessfully tries to stop him and save Cordelia. The eel and the barracuda attack Dylan.

Pi learns that Troy is a true nightmare for the inhabitants of the reef, and that nobody has enough courage to stop him. He meets a sea turtle, Nerrisa, who teaches him some kind of martial arts and shows him some places where Troy could get stuck or worse, so Pi could defeat him.

As the day of the fight between Troy and Pi gets closer, Cordelia begs Pi to not do that, because Troy could kill him. In the meantime, Troy is trying to find a pearl and give it to Cordelia. He promised he'll find the most beautiful pearl in the ocean for her (in the film, when a fish gives a pearl to another one, it means the first fish wants to marry the other one). He gets angry and sends his pals to find one, and they see Nerissa's dark-blue pearl and try to steal it, unsuccessfully. Fearing of Troy's punishment, they steal the pink pearl of Dylan's mother.

The day of the fight comes. Troy appears on the reef and starts singing rimes, like he's the best, the strongest and so on. Pi stops him and provokes him. Troy gets angry and chases him to kill him. Pi quickly swims through narrow passages, and Troy gets stuck, but is saved by the divers from the beginning of the movie.

Pi tries out another trap: a sea current filled with jellyfish. Troy bashes into one and faints. He falls on the sea floor. Pi comes to him to claim his victory, but Troy suddenly awakens and kicks him. The other inhabitant of the reef, when they see what happened, rush in to help Pi. Some of them attack Troy, and the others help Pi.

Pi gets better and lures Troy into a fishing net. As the net is going to the surface and the only way out is getting narrower and narrower, Pi quickly swims to the top and jumps out of it. Troy tries to do the same, but is to big to get through. He cannot get out, and he gets pulled out of the water.

Everybody celebrates the victory. Dylan manages to defeat his provokers, Troy's two pals, and takes the pearl they have stolen. Nerissa gifts his blue pearl to Pi, and he gives it to Cordelia. She accepts him. Even the eel and the barracuda start celebrating and find their place among the others.

OK, these are thing that I noticed in the film:

* Firstly, I'm not sure that in Boston there are so colourful fish as Pi (he's orange).

* Next, the dolphins (porpoises) that saved him and brought him to the reef are very stupid and unnaturally looking.

* How can Dylan know that Cordelia was in National Geographic? He couldn't just walk out of the water and buy one!

* The people that made this film should have made the fish look more natural. In this way I'm not even sure that Troy really is a tiger shark (because I think that tiger sharks have some kind of stripes on them).

* There's a wise sea turtle, Nerissa. Why does it always need to be a turtle? Putting a sea snake or something instead of Nerissa would be more original, I think.

* The graphics are awful!

* Troy is smiling through the whole film! How can a baddie smile all the time? He must be a psychopath or retarded or something!?

* I noticed a goof in the film: in the current there are some jellyfish, and Troy bashes IN THE HEAD of one. The heads don't sting, only the tentacles or how are they called.

* There is a walrus or something in the film, and, during the whole film, he did not go to the surface to breathe (I say this because walruses can't breathe under water).

In the end, I give this film a 3 out of 10. Why 3, why not 1? Because I watched it the second time with my little cousin, a toddler. She enjoyed the film, so I think this movie is suited for toddlers.

Functioning only as an apt definition for "hot mess," "The Reef" is really just an awful movie. The script, the voice acting, and the animation are not even a notch above film school amateur hour. In fact, a conscientious mouse jockey in his mom's basement could probably compose a 5-minute CGI short on his Mac with more going for it.

"The plot" does not matter as the similarities between it, "Finding Nemo," and "Shark Tale" are so obvious that Helen Keller could find them. The glaring deficiencies in the quality of CGI, screenplay, voice acting and the feeble rip-off of other far more capable screen stories makes one wonder why someone at some point didn't come to their senses and ditch this project long before it ever made it in the can.

It tries for some jokes but fails every time. In fact, I don't think I laughed once. Even purposefully bad groaners fail to elicit a chuckle. The puns are so deliberate and juvenile it's baffling that it could have passed muster to any adult sensibility. But, then again, even "Howard the Duck" got made.

One of the key reasons there are no laughs is that there is no good voice acting. There is zero personality attached to these characters. Everyone involved is phoning in it and probably going for a paycheck to cover their Christmas fund.

Movies like this make you appreciate the thoughtful craftsmanship of Pixar's movies. It makes you realize how vital the story and the composition of the script is - not to mention, of course, their vastly superior CGI animation. Even relatively "bad" CGI movies like Shark Tale and Madagascar have tons more personality and skill behind them than "The Reef" does. As desperately tired as I am of all these awful and cheaply made CGI movies about animals, insects, or both, at least most of them have some basic charm and a few jokes you may actually laugh at, thus in some measure vaguely redeeming themselves.

"The Reef," however, has no redeeming value at all. Best to leave this one alone as watching it will merely be torture.

The Reef (aka Shark-bait) is a(n occasionally watchable) mess of a movie. The plot of the film has Pi, a fish from Boston Harbor fleeing south to "The Reef" to find his aunt after his parents are scooped up in a fishing net. Once on the reef he falls for the most beautiful girl in the area and runs a foul of a shark.

The film doesn't so much plagiarize Finding Nemo (which is sort of reversed here) and the other animated films from the last few years as rip them apart and stitches them together into a movie so unoriginal you'll swear you've seen it before. It's a jaw dropping in its unoriginality. There's a drinking game in this movie where you take a drink every time you spot a riff from some other movie. I'd love to see someone take the film and annotate it so that there is a list of steals.

The character designs run the gamut from really good to what were they thinking. The look of the girl fish for example is quite lovely, the design for Pi's "psychic" aunt is amusing, while the look of the three eyed friend of Pi's parents back in Boston is clichéd but very funny. On the other hand characters like the shark and the old timers are blocky and awful. The backgrounds are an odd mix. Some are fantastically detailed settings like Pi's aunt's home or the pirate ship which look great; on the other hand there is the nothingness of the open ocean (and I do mean nothingness), with the characters seeming to hang all alone in a world that's just the blank sea. (while I understand that's probably what it would look like in the ocean, its really dull to look at on the big screen). The some of the animation is lacking any sort of finished quality appearing as what looks like a half step up from test footage. Its as if they had an incomplete staff of animators so they could only really finish bits of the animation.

Oddly the dialog seems much better than the Frankenstein like plot. To be certain many of the jokes have been lifted from elsewhere and you will find yourself saying the punchlines before the characters do, but there's a good chance that you'll still be amused thanks to the work of people like Fran Drescher, John Rhys-Davies and R Lee Ermey who take their stock characters and turn them into something more than a wooden prop.

Its oddly amusing at times in a weird sort of way, but I can't recommend you actually pay to see this movie. To be certain this is the sort of movie you'll watch a couple of times on cable but that doesn't mean its worth your hard earned money. Its one of those bad movies that you find yourself enjoying on TV simply because its not as bad as your other choices and because its not really costing you anything.

Trust me this is a cable movie....

Compared to this, films like The Little Mermaid and more recently Finding Nemo are broad, groundbreaking epic pieces of surrealist animated genius that echo Fantasia. Yes, Shark Bait truly is that bad in fact it could well be looked at as a new low for animation as a whole. But it's not that Shark Bait isn't just bad, it's mostly pointless. Did we really need another film about a young and energetic hero who must overcome his self doubts and doubters as he strives to win the heart of a young female and beat the bad guys in the process, creating a better and safer new order? No, we didn't but Shark Bait goes ahead anyway.

I read that this film was a joint venture between the U.S.A. and South Korea; ugh, what do these two nations have in common when it comes to film-making? Shark Bait's cast includes R. Lee Ermey; John Rhys-Davies; Donal Logue; Rob Schneider and Freddie Prinze Jr. Love or hate any of the cast, that's still an impressive array of different personalities but judging by the animation, did they blow all the money on the cast? There used to be a time when it didn't matter who was doing the voiceovers and the goal was to create a dynamic and visually impressive experience, not any more it would seem; now we have to have names to fill up the posters and get people in – but get them into what?

A word on the animation. On this occasion, the film looks more like a badly rendered PC screensaver produced by a second rate company for an equally second rate computer, and that's at the best of times. There is one occasion when the animation threatens to pull through and that's when the hero and his girl are above the sea level watching the moon – the ripples in the water and clouds above seem impressive enough, but that's when you realise the two fish have been above the water for so long, they would've 'drowned' by now.

Also, a point on the joint U.S.A./South Korea set-up is that they're two very different nations when it comes to animation or cartoons. When I think of Korea, I guess I think of 'funimation', or 'cute' animation, something that has perhaps spilled over from Japanese contemporary culture. Now, it's all well and good saying this is a kids film and so forth and that it fits but there is a clash of ideas here. The Americans have made some cracking animated films in the last few years such as Monster's Inc.; Ice Age and Finding Nemo but these were American through and through and there is no 'influence' or clashing from other nation's animated ideas.

The Shark Bait of the title is Pi (Prinze Jr.), a young fish whose family is swept away by a human fishing net and flees to a fish sanctuary far away to live with a relative. It's here he meets girlfriend Cordelia (Evans-Wood) and shark bully Troy (Logue), who wants Cordelia for himself – can you imagine what the kids between a shark and an angelfish (or whatever Cordelia is) would look like? Anyway, Pi must come to learn that just taking something is the wrong belief and sharing what Troy thinks is additionally incorrect so he must go through a training montage with an elder mentor and on and on it goes. Now, delivering this sort of message to very young kids is fine, I suppose, but when a film is so inept that it sounds like the voice talent was recorded in someone's living room and the script sees needs-must to throw in homosexual German crabs and a photographer of French decent as well as Jamaican and Southern United State accents for the hell of it, it grates on me.

Additionally at Shark Bait's centre is the idea that Cordelia, the female the two males are fighting over, is nothing but a mere prize to be won and that's the catalyst for the whole film to even happen - that part certainly isn't a positive message. The film is all feint, feint set up and no payoff. Did I mention Cordelia is supposed to be some sort of fish celebrity that appears on the cover of National Geographic? I guess the fish know that because one of them must've seen a discarded issue, amid all the other trash, on the bed of where Pi was living at the very beginning. But, this celebrity status is non-existent from the beginning and she manages to go to a concert with Pi without anyone noticing her – that's before the trip above water where they should've died.

The film wonders on and Pi eventually undertakes a training routine from a turtle that knows some sort of martial art in which controlling water bursts and moving at high speed are key; Pi only cracks it when he actually builds up enough energy to get genuinely angry. Everything from Troy's nasty sidekicks, one of whom seems to posses an accent reminiscent of a 1930s Hollywood gangster whilst the other seems to be doing a really bad Christopher Walken impression, to Troy's own frequent rhyming as he attempts to get across a sense of evil; it all fails and fails big time.