2023 | PG-13 | starring Isaiah LaBorde, Tommy Wiseau, Mark Valeriano, Ashton Leigh | written & directed by Tommy Wiseau | 1 hr 39 mins | 1/2 out of 5 stars |
It’s been over 20 years since Tommy Wiseau came out of nowhere, shrouded in mystery, and graced the world with his epic disasterpiece The Room. Since then, The Room has achieved cult status, had a movie made about it, a documentary made about it, and Tommy has done the awards circuit – however the idea that he would make another movie actually never crossed my mind. Now, after several years of taking his highly anticipated follow-up on a midnight-movie theater road show, Big Shark is streaming for the first time. On, where else, Tubi. For a bad film connoisseur, this is an amazing time to be alive. It’s like the backward mirror image of Netflix and Peter Bogdanovich busting Orsen Welle’s The Other Side of the Wind out of an Iranian vault and letting us see a new Orsen Welles movie in 2018. A new Tommy Wiseau movie in 2026.
Fear not, looking at the half-star rating. I can’t give this movie any higher. It’s barely a movie. BUT, unlike most things that get slapped a dreaded half-star out of offense or incompetence, rest assured Big Shark is hilariously incompetent. It is absolutely a so-bad-it’s-good must see. It’s a barely coherent genre movie that takes all sorts of side-quests into nonsense, full of terrible acting, terrible special effects, and all of the fingerprints we’ve come to expect from a Tommy Wiseau movie. It’s noticeably not as much of a vanity project for Wiseau as The Room is (even allowing another actor top billing while Tommy’s name is given a larger font in the end credits), but it still has the quality of an alien who came to Earth and is trying his best to replicate how human beings talk to each other.
Now, let’s start by managing expectations. This isn’t The Room. One of the things that makes The Room so unique in the bad movie space is that it’s not a genre movie. There are no bad special effects to laugh at. There are no cops tripping over cardboard tombstones or spaceships hung from visible strings like in Plan 9 from Outer Space. It is a straight, hyper-serious drama seemingly put together without any oversight by a madman, which makes it all so surreal.
Big Shark is a genre movie. Now what genre, that’s debatable, but it does ostensibly have a structure where a shark shows up and we have to stop the shark. Instead of flying off into ever escalating chaos like The Room, it comes to a pretty straight-forward ending. How it gets there, that’s where the fun comes in. The other thing that puts a damper on the movie is that it lacks that element of surprise The Room had. Now I expect Tommy to act like a lunatic. When he goes from looking half asleep to randomly screaming and crying, it’s more of an “Oh, that’s just Tommy” effect than the startling it once was. So, it’s not The Room, I would put it more with Birdemic or Fateful Findings or even this year’s Citizen Vigilante, but that’s still very funny. Rest assured, unlike the backtracking James Nguyen has done with The Room or annoyance Claudio Fragasso has over Troll 2, Tommy hasn’t learned a thing or become self-aware. He’s just making an easier bad movie.
It opens like a firefighter drama, with three guys – Tim (Isaiah LaBorde), Mark (Mark Valeriano) and Patrick (Wiseau) – saving people in a fire and receiving a heroes’ welcome at an award ceremony at a local movie theater. After a fishing date with his girlfriend Sophia (Ashton Leigh), Patrick is convinced that he saw a 35 foot shark in the lake and spends a few days arguing with his girl and bantering with the guys who refuse to believe him, while everyone says that everyone else has a “delusional mind”. Suddenly and for no reason, New Orleans starts to flood and a CGI shark of ever-changing size coasts on those few inches of water and starts eating people. With the only people in town to stop it being these three firefighters, they set off with a plan to save the city, while constantly being diverted into bars and pool halls after every failed encounter.
Where to even begin. If you’re wondering why the city is flooding or where the shark came from or why these 3 drunken firefighters are the only people able to save the city – keep wondering, those are questions Tommy never anticipated and has no interest in answering. Incoherent is the word here. Big Shark is full of bizarre choices, repeated dialog, repeated underwater diving footage and it often crumbles into banter that feels like Wiseau thinks this is Curb Your Enthusiasm-level improvised wit. It’s shot on location in New Orleans around unsuspecting people who walk casually by the CGI shark as it attacks someone. Our intrepid heroes are constantly “looking for” a shark that just chased them down the street. At no point is there any sense of urgency to any of it. Structured more like The Big Lebowski than a monster movie, Tim, Patrick and Mark regularly hit the bar and take their sweet time before getting back to the plan at hand. There is also a hilarious scene early on where the group come across a guy brutally beating another man on the sidewalk and stop to help… the assailant, whom they are best friends with and share greetings while the other man lay bloody on the ground.
Wiseau again sleep-walks through work he is supposedly so passionate about. From an acting standpoint, LaBorde and Leigh are giving it their all. It seems like they understood the movie here (better than Tommy), knew it would be bad, but treated it like an audition tape for something else. And Leigh is kind of adorable. The thing I did not anticipate going into Big Shark was how much Tommy would be singing throughout the movie. Yes, he stops the movie dead to sit in front of the camera and grace us with his singing voice. It happens so often Big Shark is more of a musical than a horror or action movie.
It’s more Birdemic than The Room but it’s pure pleasure to watch Tommy Wiseau back at it again. Big Shark is very funny in a more conventional bad movie way and that’s completely fine. It’s less serious, more designed for fun, but still has that sincere effort behind it. Given how much has happened to Tommy in the last 20 years, that he hasn’t become more self-aware and delivered something as cringingly designed for camp as Sharknado or Birdemic 2 is a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. Don’t let it pass by.