During the pandemic, I was able to catch up on some TV series and movies thanks to subscribing to several different streaming services (Netflix, Hulu and others). I was binge watching throughout the furlough from my (previous) employment. Then I found a position with another company.
But this is about a couple movies I watched that were “unreal”, as in, “you got to be kidding me.”
First up was “Horizon Line“, released in 2020. This 92-minute waste of time is listed in the “thriller” and “drama” categories, but should be categorized as “ridiculous”. The premise: A small single-engine plane with a couple and a pilot on board, experiences several emergencies that were pieced together at the last minute. The couple was flying to a remote island in the middle of BFE to attend a wedding. Fine. But let’s add some drama and thriller: 1) the pilot has a heart attack and dies at the controls and, yes there’s more, a major storm is brewing. It doesn’t end there because 3) the plane is running out of fuel.
To keep the “younger” generation watching this beyond the opening title roll, “Sara” hooks up with her ex-boyfriend, “Jackson”, making this an instant hit to some. As a result, she misses her boat to the wedding and has to fly on this small plane with her ex- and the pilot. After the heart attack, the plane freefalls and the couple regains control.
Unfortunately, the movie continues. With a broken autopilot, they fly into a major storm and are losing fuel. Remember pilots, take offs are optional. Landing is mandatory and this is one way to prove it. More drama but the lightbulb goes off and Jackson decides he is a wing walker and climbs outside the plane, that is still flying, and tries to patch the fuel line. He breaks his arm in the process and eventually gets back in the plane. If this isn’t edge-of-your-seat you…Sara remembers there is back-up fuel onboard and SHE now takes the role of daredevil and crawls out onto the plane which is still in the air. Liquor bottles of “fuel” are passed out of the pilot’s window to Sara and she then takes it over to the fuel inlet on top of the wing. Yep, that’s right.
From then on, the movie is a complete blur as I was either laughing so hard or decided my phone was more important. They run out of fuel, land on a sand bar, which disappears as the tide rises and (insert the near ending of the Titanic movie), but before he dies, a fishing boat rescues them. Yeah, this garbage is over.
Great White, released in 2021. If you saw the trailer and thought “this looks a lot like ‘Jaws'”, you would be correct. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Jaws and it helped keep me out of the Gulf of Mexico for years when I was a kid. It was an original. But, now older, I have to look at these hungry fish movies different. While watching Great White, just as with Jaws, I had to ask – are they so hungry that they would chew through wood and metal to get a small human? In Great White, when they showed scenes from underwater and the swimming shark(s), there were some fairly large/giant fish swimming near them as well – I always assumed sharks ate fish? But as soon as two people quietly swam away from a deflating raft, the shark went after them. Great White doesn’t take place on a boat, it takes place on an airplane that lands in the ocean with a group on board. That’s when the fun begins.
If you saw any of the Jaws movies, you can figure out what happens here. It has been done before (in Jaws) except they should have added “We’re gonna need a bigger airplane” to the script. Instead of a bomb or electric wire killing the shark, this movie used a flare gun. Sure, whatever. In one of the scenes where are sure-to-be-dead humans were trying to out-swim the great white, the shark swam through metal and steel rods and beams to get to the two women almost killing itself in the process – such a thriller.
Before the end of this garbage-fest, I really didn’t care what happened to them. I felt sorry for the sharks because they could not see all the seafood that was around them and, in every underwater scene, there was plenty to eat besides the people. But, if that was the case, that the sharks ate the sea life that was around them to begin with, there wouldn’t be much of a story here. Even though, this story has been exhausted over and over in the past.
I get what’s happening. Hollywood is just turning out movies. It probably took me longer to write this “review” than it did to make both of those movies from concept to video, combined. And I’m a fairly fast typer even including my typing mistake corrections. LOL If your opinion is different than mine, that’s ok. You probably read my review/opinion of them and are thinking “you got to be kidding me”. Add your comment and let me know.
