I had never heard about this 2020 monster shark movie from China, prior to sitting down and watching it here in 2023. The Chinese cinema has definitely upped their game and pumped out a lot of creature features these past couple of years.
The storyline in "Land Shark" is pretty straight forward, generic actually, even for a shark-themed movie. But it does make for some good old fashioned cheesy fun with a monstrous shark wrecking havoc on people. It is the kind of movie where you just lean back, grab a snack and watch the mayhem on the screen - with the occassional laugh or shaking of the head because of the questionable CGI.
"Land Shark" is essentially just a lazy writing ordeal, and director Cheng Si-Yu delivers a movie that is one-third "Deep Blue Sea", one-third "Jaws" and one-third "Jurassic World". It is a very unoriginal script they came up with here.
I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in "Land Shark". But taking into consideration the nature of the script and the outcome of the movie, then the actors and actresses on the cast list performed as to be expected I suppose.
The main character Song Yi (played by Liqun Luo) is a blatant rip-off of the Owen Grady (played by Chris Pratt) from the 2015 Jurassic World movie, from the mannerism, personality and right down to wearing almost the exact same outfit. Talk about lazy writing.
The movie has some serious goofs. For example, they are 100 meters underwater in the research station, yet when the panorama glass window is shattered by the shark and water rushes in, the room somehow managed not to be fully submerged, which makes zero sense. And there is an issue with the shark's size. The shark is mentioned to be 4 meters, yet when it is lunging out of the water in the flooded room to attack people, it is a mere size of an adult man. And once the shark takes to land, it is very clear that it is length is well beyond four meters. It is ridiculous that the movie makers would get these things inaccurate.
Visually then "Land Shark" was a mixed bag of nuts. Some of the scenes of the CGI rendered shark were actually quite good and looked real, while others were just atrocious to behold and were of toe-curlingly poor CGI rendering and animation. And what was up with the growling sound that the shark was making? I can only assume that they opt to give a shark vocal cords during the genetic alteration, as a shark doesn't have vocal cords given from nature.
Watchable for what it was, "Land Shark" is exactly what you would assume it to be when you sit down and watch it.
My rating of director Cheng Si-Yu's 2020 movie "Land Shark" lands on a five out of ten stars.
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