The Main Cinema in Minneapolis, which hosted the long-awaited Minnesota premiere of Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark last weekend, serves strong whiskey cocktails in cans at the concession stand. Ordering one, I thought twice and said, “Better make it two; it’s a Tommy Wiseau movie.”
Fans of Wiseau’s disasterpiece The Room, often hailed as the Citizen Kane of so-bad-it’s-good movies or The Worst Movie of All Time, know this is the best way to see his work: in a theater packed with fellow fans, perhaps a little tipsy if that’s your thing, absorbing and generating a cloud of infectious laughter at the absurdity of it all. With The Room, Wiseau legitimately set out to make his own personal Citizen Kane, an Oscar-worthy drama that would prove his talent to the world. Big Shark is what happens when he aims a bit lower and tries to make a fun B-movie; the result is much more similar to Sharknado or even Birdemic: Shock and Terror than Jaws or The Birds.
Like Birdemic, Big Shark is in no particular hurry to get to the actual threat posed in its title. Wiseau stars (of course) as Patrick, the ostensible leader of a trio of firefighter buddies in New Orleans. In the opening scene they rescue two children from a burning house, with the kind of convincing dialogue one has come to expect from a Wiseau production (“Is this your kid? Here, take it!”), and they spend most of the next 40 minutes day-drinking and basking in the glory of their achievement. Patrick is a weird fit in the group, as any Wiseau character is inevitably bound to be, a significantly older-rock star type who is inexplicably wearing gloves at least half the time (maybe Patrick is vampire, to paraphrase an abandoned idea Wiseau had for his protagonist in The Room).
The large murderfish promised in the title is offscreen for the first half of the movie, during which time it is not even the subject of most of the rambling, largely ad-libbed conversations between Patrick (I keep wanting to call him Johnny; the characters are both just Wiseau as far as I can tell) and his pals. Patrick insists he saw a 35-foot shark while out on a boat with his girlfriend, Sophia (Ashton Leigh) who is barely a character at all because if a woman isn’t tearing Wiseau apart, Lisa, he doesn’t know what to do with her. Later he tells the other firefighters, Tim and Georgie (Isaiah LaBorde and Mark Valeriano, respectively) about what only he saw in two separate but almost identical dialogue scenes, because apparently Wiseau drunkenly improvised the editing as well as the writing and performance on this one.
The sound editing in particular is a frequent source of comedy, once again Birdemic-like in its jarring cuts, and when the shark finally does start appearing on the streets of New Orleans, it is similarly jarring in its abruptness. Scenes cut from character drama or lighthearted banter to one of those characters being bitten in half by a giant shark with arbitrary suddenness, provoking squeals of laughter instead of jumps and gasps. The logic by which the city streets suddenly flood sufficiently for a shark to even breathe, let alone attack, makes the Sharknado series seem Neil deGrasse Tyson-approved by comparison; as one character hilariously observes, “The water comes and goes.”
It is a testament to the unique charms of a Tommy Wiseau joint that Big Shark is least entertaining when it most resembles a conventional movie, which it luckily barely ever does. All the alien man-child tendencies that make The Room so endlessly fascinating are present here, as they are Wiseau’s very essence: his wardrobe choices (why the gloves???), his manner of speaking/writing (though much of the dialogue was improvised, multiple characters use the very Wiseau phrase “occupying my brain,” for example), the observations about human group behavior that could only have come from an extraterrestrial observer (in this one, the boys drink a lot and play basketball instead of constantly tossing a football around even while wearing tuxedos, and it somehow seems just as unnatural).
We had to wait two decades for a second feature from Wiseau, and it is almost nothing like its trailer, which featured Greg Sestero as Georgie and was reportedly only made “for fun,” with no intention of actually making the movie. Wiseau himself appears not to have aged or changed a bit; maybe Tommy is vampire. Big Shark feels like it somehow emerged from the mind of a troubled second-grader who may or may not be from outer space, and I’ve never had more fun in a movie theater.
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