Want to watch Alicia Silverstone fight the world’s fakest looking CGI shark?
The Requin is a movie mostly notable for how much it looks like no one is anywhere near the ocean they’re supposedly floating in
Film Features Alicia Silverstone
The condemned: The Requin (2022)
The plot: This movie might consider it a spoiler to say that the ocean is not devoid of fish. Far be it from us to chastise people in a desperate situation, but watching people consistently make the worst possible choice in a life-or-death situation, over and over again, tends to lead a viewer to think, “Have these people never seen a movie where someone got lost at sea?” There are animals in the water. Just a head’s up, for the characters you’re about to meet.
The Requin follows married couple Jaelyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Kyle (James Tupper) as they begin their getaway vacation at a fancy Vietnam resort. They’re staying in one of those glamorous bungalows-over-the-water, the kind where you can dive off your back porch into snorkeling-friendly reefs. It’s pretty clear this isn’t just for fun, though; we meet Jaelyn waking up from a nightmare that looks like a horrible tragedy took place during her pregnancy when she went into labor, and her reference to having “another episode” lets you know she’s got some PTSD from the incident.
But after a phone call with her family to establish the lack of WiFi in the area, an awkward convo about the dangers of social media (thanks for the talking-to, movie), and a quick visit to a nearby tourism landmark so Jaelyn can be handed a little talisman “for good luck” by a local (ironic foreshadowing!), we get to the storm. A small tsunami lashes the resort and send Jaelyn and Kyle’s bungalow adrift, spinning out into the ocean. When they come to in the morning, they begin the process of hoping against hope that someone will see and rescue them.
Of course, not helping matters is Kyle’s bloody leg wound, which is always closed until the camera lingers on it, at which point it starts emitting seeming liters of blood into the water. If you’ve seen any ocean-set thrillers (read: one more movie than either Jaelyn or Kyle have seen, I guess), you know where this is heading: Sharks soon attack, and the pair are frantically trying to stay above water, out of the hungry maws of their predators, and in the direction of land. They do none of these things well. And when salvation (in several forms) finally does arrive, these two immediately fuck it up. It’s no spoiler to say somebody lives, but not for lack of trying to bring about the exact opposite result.
Over-the-top box copy: Nothing yet. The cover of the film bears the tagline “Terror will surface,” which isn’t bad, but it also features a shot of a massive shark about to sink its chompers into Jaelyn. Let’s disappoint the killer-shark movie fans right now—the majority of this film features no sharks. And when one does arrive, hoo boy; let’s just say the makers of Syfy’s schlock-at-sea mockbusters must be feeling pretty good about their CGI integration skills. We’ll come back to that.
The descent: Remember two sentences ago, when I said the thing about disappointing fans of killer-shark movies? That’s me. I’m that fan. The Meg? I was there at 1 p.m. the Wednesday after it opened, with no else but me and my partner in the theater. We had a fucking ball with that piece of crap. So if there’s a big shark movie out there, as long as it doesn’t look like intentionally cornball garbage (e.g. most of those Syfy movies), I’m going to be watching it. Fool me once, shame on The Requin.
The theoretically heavenly talent: While some will likely recognize James Tupper, a supporting player in TV series like (deep breath) Men In Trees, Mercy, Revenge, Aftermath, Big Little Lies, A Million Little Things, The Hardy Boys, and more, the star is Alicia Silverstone, who will likely never get a more iconic role than Cher in Clueless, but is nevertheless a fine actor in general. That is, until she came face to face with this film.
The execution: I hope you like scenes of a woman shrieking and/or groaning ineffectually at nothing, because that’s a good 25% of The Requin. Presumably, at some point the director told Silverstone, “Look, you’re the star, so the audience needs to hear you continually making noise, no matter the situation,” and she took that note to heart. I thought of making an audio clip stringing together all of her non-linguistic vocalizations, because it would probably be pretty funny, but A) it would just sound like an extremely NSFW podcast, or maybe someone really bad at ASMR, and B) it would have taken fucking forever. Rarely have I seen a decent actor so thoroughly defeated by subpar material.
The main takeaway, however, is that this is one of the most poorly green-screened films in recent memory. At no point does it look like the two of them are actually in the ocean. The background visibly jiggles in just about every shot, failing to match the camera movements, and it’s not even worked into close-frame images well. Take a look at this shot of the ocean through the opening in the bottom of their floating bungalow—it’s so poorly rendered in relation to the practical scenery, it really puts the “floating” in floating bungalow.
There’s probably an alternate reality in the multiverse in which this column just descends into my posting clip after clip of the dreadful CGI and laughing. In fairness, it’s hard not to, not when we get establishing shots like this:
Of course, that’s probably still preferable to such effective establishing shots as this following one. I wonder if we’re… still in the ocean? Seriously, count the seconds that tick by on the second shot, your jaw will drop.
Honestly, after awhile, watching this started to feel like laughing at the guy who keeps walking into glass doors and looking startled that they’re there. Sure, it’s hilarious, but you begin to worry there’s something actually wrong with them.
So instead, let’s laugh about some of the other choices this film makes! THERE ARE A LOT. But thankfully, a good chunk of them fall into the “that’s incredibly dumb in a fun way” camp. For instance, Kyle’s behavior, prior to his crippling leg injury that eventually lures sharks to his delicious lower half: He’s here to prove to his wife how much he cares and supports her. So naturally, when a massive wave knocks her over the side of the bungalow during the tsunami, he grabs her arms, holds her fast to keep his beloved wife from being swept away to her death, and then… decides that would be the perfect moment to let go, start waving for help, and yelling haplessly at no one in particular. It’s great:
If I were Jaelyn, I would’ve waited until the first moment he turned his back after this, and then bludgeoned him with a rock.
Look, I get it; no one’s making the best decisions when they’re floating on a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean with a gaping leg wound and approximately 48 gallons of blood from it chumming the water. But even with that caveat in place, the choices these people make are TBS Very Funny. For example, when the sharks finally do arrive to menace Kyle and Jaelyn, the initial attack is fended off by Jaelyn grabbing a piece of bungalow floorboard and slapping the water with it—classic terrifying stuff to a shark. But when the predators release his leg and he pops back up, Kyle grabs his wife and yells, “”Paddle! Hurry!” Paddle… where, exactly, Kyle? 30 feet to the left in the middle of the ocean? Good plan.
It’s a shame the film turned out like this, a low-budget clunker not that far removed from a Syfy original. The director is Lê Văn Kiệt, whose previous film, Furie, is the highest-grossing Vietnamese film in that country’s history, and reportedly a pretty solid martial-arts actioner. Maybe something got lost in translation, or maybe he’s a director without a facility for CGI; whatever happened, this movie looks bad, and pulls bad performances out of normally reliable actors Tupper and Silverstone. Of course, when your climactic shark sequence pulls a move like this, I’m not sure there’s any way it could’ve recovered, unless someone in the effects team was hoping to at least wring a few unintentional laughs from the movie:
Yes, this movie literally jumps the shark.
Likelihood it will rise from obscurity: Dim. In a world populated with movies like The Shallows, The Reef, 47 Meters Down, and more, one that straddles the line between attempted quality and so-bad-it’s-good doesn’t succeed at either.
Damnable commentary track or special features? Sadly, no, because I would love to just listen in as Alicia Silverstone watches The Requin from start to finish and talks about it. I suspect most of her thoughts she’ll be keeping to herself.
114 Comments
Seems a shame, since Furie is a fantastic female-led and absolutely brutal martial-arts thriller. Mind you, this sounds equally as entertaining, for all the wrong reasons. And if you’re a shark movie fan, Alex, I’m sure you’ve seen Castellari’s majestic Great White / L’Ultimo Squalo?
I love how being “female-led” literally makes the movie BETTER in your eyes. That makes sense.
The film from which the mighty James Franciscus was denied his Best Acting Opposite A Shark Oscar?
Damn: sharks, seagulls; is there anything Franciscus can’t do?
Also, the film in which Vic Morrow’s accent seems to keep drifting from vaguely English to Irish to Scottish and back again. Reminded me of Brando’s performance in The Missouri Breaks.
Also one of Vic Morrow’s last film roles. He appeared in another Castellari film just after to that one, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, before The Twilight Zone: The Movie which was obviously his last role.
Bronx Warriors also has that terribly uncomfortable line of dialogue when Enio Girolami is giving Morrow’s Hammer his orders, saying ‘If you don’t get the girl by 11 o’clock tomorrow, I’ll have your head!’, to which Morrow replies, ‘We’ll fly her in, in a helicopter.’Yikes…..
The very same. And if you want to see much of the shark footage of Castellari’s film again just watch Bruno Mattei’s – er – challenging Cruel Jaws. The lead is a guy called Richard Dew, who is a virtual clone of Hulk Hogan, even down to the lank hair and the bandanas, but he’s also the smallest guy in the cast, looking up to most of the rest of the cast. It’s like Hulk Hogan Goes To The Land Of The Giants….Sadly I’m still trying to track down a copy of Joe D’Amato’s Deep Blood….
That’s good to hear about Furie. Maybe I’ll actually watch this soon. This got added to my queue a looong time ago, superficially because I thought I should check out more of Veronica Ngo face since I saw her in Star Wars.
In which venue can we find Furie?
Netflix (in the US at least).
What the fuck does “requin” mean?
It means shark.
Though not as catchy to sing doo doo doo-doo doo-doo after.
L’enfant Requin, L’enfant Requin, dormez vous? Dormez vous?Bit my frikkin leg off. Bit my frikkin leg off.And my dong. Ding dang dong.
Box office poison, I suspect.
And why isn’t it plural.
These are good questions, but the answer to all of them is going to be that the people making this have not put as much thought into it as you have.
To quin something again.
This really bothered me too, it’s an interesting etymology: Wiktionary says ‘requin’ is French for shark (Vietnam having been a French colony, is the connection, I suppose), from an Old French word meaning “to grimace while baring teeth” or “to make an ugly face.”
It apparently appeared in English awhile ago: the 1913 Webster’s lists it as “he man-eater, or white shark (Carcharodon carcharias); — so called on account of its causing requiems to be sung.” An origin which sound pretty unlikely.
That could however be a decent explanation for how English speaking people who didn’t look closely at the French origins interpreted it. It sounds like what the truth ought to be, even if it’s all wrong, and that can be a powerful motif in how stories get going…
Requin was a whole chapter in Moby Dick.
“As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him Requin.”But it’s from Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale.
There we go! It’s been a while since I read it, might have to break it out soon.
Just doing a Ctrl+F on the text, I still got sucked in and read a few chapters.
I follow an account on Twitter that posts passages from Moby Dick every few hours, it’s a blast.
It apparently appeared in English awhile ago: the 1913 Webster’s lists it as “he man-eater, or white shark (Carcharodon carcharias); — so called on account of its causing requiems to be sung.” An origin which sound pretty unlikely. Wiktionary clears this up. The 1913 Websters has a pretty obvious error – it says the origin of requin in English is the French reqiem (requiem) and doesn’t mention the French word requin (shark) at all.Requin in English is “dated” which means “not yet archaic”. I’ve never seen it before personally, but I bet it’s in Moby Dick a bunch of times.This has kind of rattled me actually. How the fuck did Websters make that error? Requin is French for shark, like chat is French for cat. It’s a kindergarten-level French animal word. Why would they think the English word requin, meaning shark, comes from the French reqiem?They even made up a little explanation for it. Or did some sailor tell them this and the believed it? Really odd.Websters 1913 quote:Re”quin (r?”kw?n), n. [F., fr. reqiem a Mass sung for the dead. See Requiem.] (Zoöl.) The man-eater, or white shark (Carcharodon carcharias); — so called on account of its causing requiems to be sung.Also look at this image because it’s captioned “bébé requin” and that really tickles me for some reason…
You know, like Requin for a Drean?
Renquin Sandwich
Alicia Silverstone’s gotta eat…….I’ll show myself out.
I was thinking the same thing.
Send this one right over to Rifftrax!
And chew for her children, who aren’t allowed to do that for themselves!
I had a huge crush on her back in the early 90s when she was doing the Aerosmith videos and then Clueless. I just checked her imdb and she appears to have stopped doing major roles right after Batman. Since then its been b movies (or worse) and bit parts in tv shows. Which is too bad. I think she was a competent actress.
Tuk tuk?
?
https://onestep4ward.com/tuesday%E2%80%99s-travel-rant-tuk-tuk-drivers/
I’ve never actually been interested in these “Everyone’s trapped in one horrible place” movies- I’m sure some of them are good, mind you. But the genre just feels like, if you don’t really nail it, it would get irritating very quickly. Also since this is 90% of the movie maybe at some point they should have splurged on some kind of water tank for at least a few shots to sell the illusion. I realize shooting on water is very difficult but if you can’t afford it maybe choose another location to be menaced by wildlife in.
The real hero here is the person who foresaw the need for bungalow structural integrity, possibly inspired by The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark.
I, on the other hand, really like stuck-in-one-place movies. Usually they aren’t so reliant on CGI.
When you think about it, that really really depends on the place.
Yeah, kind of weird to do the movie equivalent of a bottle episode, but with a setting that you cannot financially afford. It’s like deciding to do a remake of My Dinner with Andre, and then setting the conversation in an intergalactic zoo.
I SMELL SEQUEL
Philosophically, aren’t all movies that? Despite the unrealistic dreams of people like Elon Musk to colonize Mars, the fact is humanity is stuck on this one horrible planet.
Actually just the other day they were airing an interview with Alicia Silverstone on KTLA (socal CW affiliate) where she was talking about this film (god knows why). And she mentioned that they shot it basically in someone’s backyard pool in LA. I’d missed the beginning of it so didn’t know what movie she was talking about it at the time but …. yikes. You can really tell.
“Bloody” leg wound in the British sense? Blimey.
You silly “leg-before-wicket English person!”
The shark was more real than the rest if it tbh.
Is Alicia Silverstone actually a good actor? I’ve only ever seen her in the Clueless roles and in Batman and Robin and those ain’t exactly good performances.
I dimly recall a movie with her and Benicio del Toro, and a kidnapping? that she was pretty decent in.
Excess Baggage
Excess Baggage was actually kind of funny, although it was a dud at the box office.
Excess Baggage. One of several mid-90’s ‘kidnapped girl falls in love with their male kidnapper’ movies.
She’s cute in Clueless, and otherwise pretty much stinks.
Aerosmith videos
Shows ass in The Crush
That was a stunt butt
Oh, well it was nice
If you’re going to pay for an actor to have an extra on-set butt, by all means have it be a quality one.
Dakota Johnson could have a whole career as the White Stunt Butt.
There’d be some lovely karmic humor in that considering her mom’s role in ‘Body Double.’
Completely disagree – at least on Clueless. She’s great in that. The whole movie is centred around her and wouldn’t work if she didn’t have the chops and comic timing for it.Can’t offer a defence for Batman and Robin though.
She was stupidly hot in the 90s, both physically and as demanded talent, and she became a very vocal advocate against Hollywood’s treatment of women, but she never broke through “cute teen hearthrob” casting so she transitioned (quite successfully) to TV and stage. That’s probably not her fault, sometimes Hollywood just decides what your career is going to be.She’s in PETA though, so screw her.
There’s her debut in The Crush (1993) where she plays a teen who is obsessed with adult men whom she tries to kill when they don’t reciprocate. It actually isn’t a bad movie although probably wouldn’t fly today (even if the events are actually loosely based on a real case).
How was Clueless not a good performance?
Because for me she just continued playing that role in every other thing i saw her in. Same gormless look on her face, like a precursor to Jared Leto’s method of acting. Dumbly staring through everything.
Isn’t that basically what Keanu Reeves does? Just look confused with that “Whoah!” face? And yet he’s a star.
He may be a star, but I don’t think he gets accused of being a great actor.
Oh defo, and Keanu has certainly had his critics and rightly so. But Keanu somehow managed to lean into it and make something of himself. I don’t see that happening with Leto. Maybe Silverstone if she takes the Keanu route or even better goes Melissa Joan Hart.
No I don’t think anyone has ever accused her of that. This article refers to her as fine and decent, which are probably as high as it should go.
On top of being a terrible movie, it’s a weird movie, because Alicia Silverstone actually does an admirable job with one of the worst scripts I’ve ever seen, but her good performance is so incongruous with literally everything else in this absolute train wreck that it ends up seeming like a bad performance. And it’s not a bad performance, it’s just the wrong performance for the movie it’s sitting in. Like if you tried to transplant Daniel Day Lewis’ character from There Will Be Blood into an episode of Seinfeld.
So, Elaine’s dad? 😀
Least those sharks move though;
You bet I do!
In very bad film you don’t jump the shark, the shark jumps you!
I thought that looked familiar…
The only thing fake in this clip is Ginger… and Bob Denver’s hair color
Yeah Tina Louise declined to do it.
I feel like “Tina Louise turned it down” should be a euphemism for a particularly bad cash-grab. “Are you going to see the Sex Pistols on tour?” “No way, man. Tina Louise turned that shit down.”
… and she’s the last living castaway. (not counting Tom Hanks).
Fucking hell, if I were on an island with Tom Hanks I’d learn to swim like Michael Phelps and G_D help the shark that gets in my way!
You don’t like “America’s Dad”? Of course, before Hanks, Cosby used to be the one they called that, so maybe you have a point.
damn right!
I’ve met her. (A very good friend of mine is a friend of hers and gets invited to all his parties.) He told me “Do NOT ask her about Gilligan’s Island.” So when I was introduced I said I was a huge fan of the TV series Dallas and her face lit up. (She played Julie Grey, an early secretary/mistress of JR’s.) She was so happy to talk about that and not GI.
“Terror will surface,”
Bubbling up like the fart you dropped in the tub.
Winner of best visual effects
I think her scream was actually worse than the CGI.
Love her limp little hand-raise like she’s mock-scared of a toddler.
That shark badly whiffed. I feel embarrassed for it.
They’re usually so accurate when they jump twenty feet through the air.
Not sure what everyone else is seeing. This looks both crazy and amazing.
Cramazing!
How much topless car washing do we get to see here?
James Tupper washes the car while Alicia Silverstone wrastles the shark.
WFT is wrong here?!
Jaelyn? Her parents hated her from the moment she was born, eh?
I thought it was odd that it shared three letters with the husband’s name, Kyle. Like splitting Jekyll into parts.
Why do CGI sharks always look so bad? They’re smooth, largely ovoid animals that only really have to bend, they’re practically made for CG. Maybe that’s why; hack directors assume they can cheap out because the media suits the animal?
Spoilers: She chews up her husband and spits him into the shark’s mouth. No longer hungry, shark goes away.
She does it once, the shark just says, “Jesus Christ!” and then flees.
It’s coincidental that this article mentions The Reef. About a month ago, the day after my work holiday party (which I had at my house due to covid), I was feeling a bit hungover and spent a lazy day watching movies I had already seen, mostly old horror, just because I was sleepy and wasn’t up for watching something new that would require my full attention. I came across The Reef ( on Hulu IIRC) and was like, I vaguely remember seeing this, what the hell I’ll check it out, and holy shit that movie is terrifying. It takes a bit too long to get going and the characters are pretty thinly drawn, but once they get in the water it’s unbelievably tense. The use of real great white footage is amazing. The director spent weeks filming real great whites. They even had to change around some scenes in the script, because you obviously can’t get great whites to perform exactly as you’d want them to. Also, obviously, you can’t have actors swimming with a great white, but in the shots where you see them together it’s shockingly convincing, done with film composite techniques rather than CGI. The only thing that’s questionable about it is that it took it’s inspiration from a real life event, with many similarities, except it was a tiger not a great white in real life. Granted, the movie changes the circumstances and characters significantly but it also has a scene that directly replicates what happened to one of the real life victims, down the dialog the character says, that was taken directly from the account of the real life survivor. Which is a bit icky. Especially given that The Reef ends with a title card that gives the impression it’s telling a true story.
Want to watch Alicia Silverstone fight the world’s fakest looking CGI shark?Do you even need to ask?
I’m so scared of fake Sharks (Jaws 1 and 2) because of Jaws 1 and 2 that I had to barley look at videos with fake Sharks but even I had to laugh at this. Holy shit this is awful! Like wow, come on now bulid a Mechanical sharks you tools, the Meg sucked as well but it wasn’t this bad!
*in Milhouse voice* – Do I?!
What the fuck is a requin.
1. Poisson de grande taille, au corps fuselé, très puissant et très vorace.2. au figuré
Personne cupide et impitoyable en affaires.
“Les requins de la finance.”
It’s the French word for shark. Probably because they’re in Vietnam, a former French colony. Not sure why they’re using an English article with a French word.
Its release title in France is “Le Shark”
i really enjoyed this post. thank you Alex.
What in the hell is a requin? Is that a word that means something? Am I supposed to know it?
“I hope you like scenes of a woman shrieking and/or groaning ineffectually at nothing”
Heyyyy, that sounds like my wife!
This reminds me of that movie JOHN BILLIQUINS PLEASE COME HOME.
well at least I’ve been reminded of the TBS Very Funny campaign, which I enjoyed back in the day