Review: Shark Tale

Shark Tale made me want to immediately start polluting the ocean.

Shark Tale
Photo: DreamWorks Pictures

Unlike Pixar’s sweet, humanistic Finding Nemo, Shark Tale made me want to pollute the ocean. Gaudy, hyperactive, and intent on bludgeoning one’s senses and offending one’s sensibilities, the star-studded film functions like a tidal wave of pop-culture homages and toilet humor (look out for that oil-squirting octopus!) that mistakenly confuses shallow of-the-moment jokes and insincere emotion as clever and touching. Just as the timid great white shark Lenny (voiced by Jack Black) can’t stomach eating a living creature, attempts to consume this snarky, pedantic comedy may result in a serious bout of indigestion.

Oscar (Will Smith) is “a little fish in a big pond…the ocean” who desperately wants to live the bling-bling MTV Cribs lifestyle in a penthouse at the top of the reef. Working as a lowly scrubber at the local Whale Wash, the penniless (or clam-less, per the local currency) Oscar stumbles upon a get-famous-quick scheme when, moments before he’s about to be murdered for not settling outstanding debts to his boss, a pufferfish named Sykes (Martin Scorsese), he’s erroneously assumed to have killed Lenny’s older brother, Frankie (Michael Imperioli).

Publicizing himself as a “sharkslayer,” Oscar—working in tandem with Lenny, who wants to run away from home because his mob boss father, Don Lino (Robert De Niro), doesn’t accept his vegetarianism—becomes an instant celebrity. But by achieving fame and snagging his dream girl, the gold-digging Lola (Angelina Jolie), via a lie, he alienates the best friend, Angie (Renée Zellweger), who secretly loves him. No reason to hold your breath, though, because after much ballyhoo, things turn out—wait for it, wait for it—swimmingly.

Advertisement

Taking a cue from Shrek, Shark Tale is rife with pop-culture references (at one point, Oscar quotes Gladiator, A Few Good Men, and Jerry Maguire in rapid-fire succession), shameless in-movie advertising camouflaged by puns about corporate brand names (Gup for Gap, Coral-Cola for Coke, etc.), and a distressing desire to promote racial and ethnic stereotypes. This last objective, one can only presume, is to help kids at an early age understand that Italians (the sharks) are mobsters, African Americans (Smith’s Oscar) are materialistic hip-hoppers, Jamaicans (two jellyfish henchmen) are Rastafarian space cadets, and gays—what else is Lenny, with his high-pitched voice, unconventional “tastes,” and desire to disguise himself as a dolphin with make-up, a bright necktie, and a tool belt?—are weird and undesirable.

Of course, the colorfully animated Shark Tale ends on an upbeat note in which open-mindedness and integrity trumps prejudice and greed. But such climactic cheeriness hardly drowns out the appalling underlying archetypes and pro-consumerism messages that’s peddled by this rancid computer-generated backwash across its runtime.

Score: 
 Cast: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renée Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Katie Couric, Doug E. Doug, Ziggy Marley, Peter Falk, Michael Imperioli, Vincent Pastore  Director: Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson, Rob Letterman  Screenwriter: Rob Letterman, Damian Shannon, Mark Swift, Michael J. Wilson  Distributor: DreamWorks Pictures  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2004  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.