Shark Tale: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

After you’ve had “Finding Nemo” on your plate, the last thing you want is a weak second course to finish the meal. Shark sounds interesting, but if you’re going to serve it, it better have bite and it better be memorable. Otherwise, people will leave the table disappointed.

It’s just that pressure that must have faced the folks at DreamWorks Animation, whose new movie, “Shark Tale,” draws natural comparisons to its computer-generated counterpart and predecessor, the kinder, gentler “Nemo.”

As directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron and Rob Letterman from a script by Letterman and Michael Wilson, “Shark Tale” is a colorful, jive-talking minnow that runs in shallow waters.

For inspiration, it doesn’t seek its own imagination. Instead, it trolls the depths of pop culture and catches its ideas by borrowing from a clutch of other movies--“The Godfather,” “Finding Nemo,” “Jaws,” “Analyze This,” “Goodfellas” and “Car Wash” chief among them.

Unfortunately, by borrowing so liberally from so many, it misses what it needed most to make it special--originality.

Steeped in racial, gender, sexual and ethnic stereotypes, the film is a collision of two stories. First, there’s Oscar (voice of Will Smith), a Whale Wash attendant hoping to move on up to a better life with girlfriend, Angie (Renee Zellweger), when a gambling debt with his boss, the pufferfish Sykes (Martin Scorsese), gets in the way.

Second is Lenny, a closeted great white shark who lives in fear of his father, Don Lino (Robert De Niro), a menacing, masculine Italian who wants Lenny to toughen up.

When Lenny’s brother, Frankie (Michael Imperioli), is accidentally killed by an anchor, Oscar happens to be on the scene and senses an opportunity. If he takes the credit for Frankie’s death, he’ll be rewarded with fame and fortune in his reef community, which fears sharks. It’s a situation to which Lenny readily agrees to allow to unfold--so long as Oscar allows Lenny to live out the rest of his life as a peaceful dolphin.

With its theme secured (“There’s danger in being something you aren’t, kids”), “Shark Tale” swims with it. What it finds along the way are a handful of selling points--a story that begins well, artistry and style to spare in the bright, urban sea settings that recall Manhattan’s Times Square, a character in newsfish, Katie Current (Katie Couric), that’s every bit as pushy and as arrogant as Couric herself, and another character in Angelina Jolie’s sexpot Lola, who moves with the sort of va-va-voom hustle that suggests she is the very definition of undulation.

Still, parts are parts, and “Shark Tale” is made up of too many of them to suit. This isn’t so much a movie for kids as it is a movie for adults, who will smile at the references they know all too well from other movies.

Grade: B-