Empire Of The Sharks is an Asylum movie that tries to be the Mad Max: Fury Road of shark movies - which isn’t as fun as it sounds. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is still the shark movie to beat and while it had an infamously messy production, it overcame forecasts of doom to become the first true summer blockbuster, with the movie being a perfect fusion of great characters, dialogue, and suspense. The success of the movie led to a franchise, with 1978’s Jaws 2 being well-regarded while Jaws 3D and The Revenge being considered real dubs.
The success of Jaws also led to a flood of movies trying to cash in on the killer animal craze, including Orca: The Killer Whale, Piranha, and Alligator. Notable shark movies also include 1999 guilty pleasure Deep Blue Sea, The Shallows and The Meg, where Jason Statham faces off with a 75-foot shark. “Ironically” bad shark movies have also been a SYFY staple, including the Sharknado franchise and Ghost Shark.
In 2016, SYFY produced Planet Of The Sharks, a film where 98% of the world is covered in water after the ice caps melt. It was basically Waterworld meets Jaws, but fun as that description may sound, the film itself was a chore of terrible acting and CGI. The movie must have done well for SYFY too, as the sequel Empire Of The Sharks followed in 2017 from the same director Mark Atkins.
Empire Of The Sharks plot at least gets marks for creativity, where a warlord played by John Savage (The Deer Hunter) can control an army of sharks with special gloves. He uses this army to control other colonies and when he captures a girl with the ability to call to sharks without any gloves, a team comes together to rescue her and stop him. The movie feels like it took a few pages from the Mad Max: Fury Road playbook, but outside of a couple of fun moments, Empire Of The Sharks just isn’t much fun. The acting and script are both poor, even by the modest standards of a SYFY TV movie, but at least the CGI is a step from Planet Of The Sharks.
When Empire Of The Sharks unleashes the craziness it can be undemanding fun, but those moments are few and far between. The movie is ultimately very skippable for all but the biggest shark movie fans, which a shame because the concept could have been a lot of fun with the right execution.
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