The Room is a once in a generation hit, capturing the hearts of all film obsessed teens laughing ironically along with the nonsense on screen. Seeing that Tommy Wiseau was following that up with Big Shark, with the opportunity for an in person Q&A with Tommy himself, I couldn’t let 17 year old me down. I booked my ticket and excitedly took my seat. With my excitement, came a level of trepidation, that the success of The Room may influence Big Shark into a self aware disaster, trying too hard to recreate the insanity of his first hit. Thankfully, the sheer levels of incompetency of everyone involved made this a joy to watch. From the low budget CGI, insane editing choices and the most unnatural acting I have ever seen, I was pretty satisfied with the follow up to The Room.
Big Shark takes place in New Orleans and as one of the main cast said on stage, is a “love letter to New Orleans”. This is a love letter to New Orleans in the same way that a picture of a piss stained alleyway is a love letter to London or Childish Gambino’s “This is America” is a love letter to the USA. Tommy was insistent this was shot on location, meaning we got naturalistic environments, with absolutely zero extras budget, making the city look like it had been left behind in the Nuclear Winter.
The film begins with stock fire effects as heroic firefighters Patrick, Georgie and Tim save two kids from a burning house. They are then awarded with medals and met with great praise for their aforementioned heroics. I knew I was in for a ride when the same crowd shots were used multiple times, in quick succession and the canned cheering was cut short from shot to shot. We get some rousing speeches from the boys, as they proclaim their love and respect for each other, Patrick opting for multiple handshakes to show his gratitude.
The Big Shark is first mentioned while Patrick and his emotionally unstable girlfriend Sophia go fishing on a lake. Patrick claims he saw a 35 foot shark, to which Sophia dismisses in some unnaturally hysterical way, whining or crying between most words. I would say this is a writing problem for the women characters, if the men were written any better. They’re all prone to rapid mood swings and random outbursts of screeching or a confusing proclivity to burst into song.
We then see two identical scenes where Patrick attempts to convince Tim and Georgie about this Big Shark, the second one being interrupted by the city being flooded up to their waists. The wade through the city for about five seconds before we cut away to a stock video of New Orleans and then right back to a dry street and a random interlude of sports.
There are a couple of these side adventures, where no story is progressed, it's just bros being dudes, shooting hoops or snookering about in the bar, forgetting about the time sensitive threat of the Big Shark, terrorizing the loosely populated city.
Before the action packed third act, we get an incredibly distressing scene in which the boys travel out to a pig farm, to bait the Big Shark with. They clumsily capture three real pigs as you watch almost in real time. They struggle to catch them while the pigs sequels peak the speakers, creating a horror film level of discomfort in everyone watching. All of this is then completely unnecessary, as the proceeding scene they go to a butcher, who gives them an already dead pig carcass. This pig carcass is also real, and features for an extended portion of the finale.
Regardless of its quality and desecration of pig corpses, the screening I was in, were here for it. We laughed, sang along with the sonically incoherent originals and “ooo-ed” in anticipation for a basketball dunk or a snooker ball being potted. The energy of the crowd made it less of a painful experience.
I will say, I have never been to a Q&A that happens prior to the film before, this one however, was scheduled before the screening. This led to questions that Tommy brushed off with “you’ll see on the big screen” or just moving on from it out of worry he would spoil the plot. He talked about shooting in New Orleans and his excitement to be in London for the premiere of the film. He also left us with a grimace inducing comment on “real women”, which might have been the only line out his mouth that didn’t get a laugh. His co-star, playing Charlotte in the film, discussed working with him, enjoying how challenging it was to be on set with him and his ideas.
Those ideas didn’t always translate to the screen though, I would say almost none of them did actually. With every technical aspect of the film being incredibly confusing. The only thing that I didn’t have a major issue with was the camera work, doing the basic thing of showing the action and framing the characters so they’re primed to be gobbled up by the low quality animated Big Shark.
The editing of these shots, I did have an issue with though. I never really agreed with the statement that you don’t appreciate good editing until you see bad editing. I think there are so many examples of flashy editing that I appreciate, or even the obvious examples like Thelma Shoonmaker where she opts to cut a story that flows perfectly, even if that does sacrifice slight continuity errors from shot to shot. This however, felt like someone dropped the timeline on the floor, shattering it into each individual clip, and to avoid getting caught, they just threw them all back into what looked like the correct position in the quickest time possible. Scenes went on for a weirdly long time, as if they had to meet a specific runtime and just used all the shots they had. At times, shots sounded like they were recorded on different days, with the audio levels rising and falling like the Tower of Terror.
The sound was a major player in this film, with water trickling sound effects, shark bites and cartoon punching sounds featuring frequently throughout, truly enhancing the cinematic flow of the story, elevating the narrative to new heights. They also used this sound library license to grab some backing tracks, but only opting to use them in the second half of the film, pumping in ill-fitting songs to guide the story along. If I closed my eyes while a song played, I would have paid good money to bet that this wasn’t a movie about Big Sharks and platonic firefighter friendships, but instead a lazily edited corporate slideshow, to boast about their amenities or advertise the unmissable offers they were running.
The casting is also confusing, as they’re either the best actors in the world or they’ve caught the Wiseau bug. They make the most confusing choices in their speech, with the most insane dialogue to match, which overlaps in a really overwhelming way at times. I imagine the script like this: “Big Shark by Tommy Wiseau” and then 100 blank pages until page 101, with the gratifying “fin” displayed in a beautiful cursive font. If this cast are delivering these lines ironically, with the understanding of what they’re making, they should be hired for everything, they sell it too well for it not to be a genuine confusion of human interaction.
If nothing else, this film gives us hope of a Disaster Artist sequel to look forward to, this time with a worldwide tour of incoherent Q&As to include. Big Shark stinks, in every way that it could, but was also an unforgettable cinema going experience, with a crowd who knew what they were signing up for and got everything they expected. I await Tommy’s reawakening in 2043 to complete his historic trilogy and close the door on his undeniable influence on cinema and the conversation fuel for awkward film students.
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