Bah

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2004)

Do not be fooled by the CG animation. Everybody thinks because a movie is animated by a computer, it's good. Thus far, most of Pixar's and Dreamworks' CG movies have had great successes in the box offices. And those movies that were smash hits, as they say, deserved to be. They were funny, entertaining, creative, novel, enjoyable, and always original. Shark Tale is grossing $147 million as I write this, but it has none of the qualities that made the previous CG movies great. Sure, it has its funny moments, but most of the humor is largely clichéd and overused. I suppose one could argue that most of the clichés are supposed to be parodies of ghetto and mafia movies. But if that was true, then the movie fails in its execution of the parody, which is merely a better way of saying the same thing.
Shark Tale is in essence the mob meets the ghetto. It includes the well-overused themes of being different, wanting wealth and fame only to lose the self, lying to achieve that wealth and fame, girl loves boy but boy doesn't realize it, etc. Put it all behind some spectacular underwater animation and throw some famous names into the mix as the voices, and you have the whole movie. Best part is, you know exactly what is going to happen in the end at around 10 minutes into the movie.
What irked me greatly throughout the entire movie was the inaccuracy of underwater life. Rather than a movie about fish, Shark Tale was more like a movie about humans, but hidden behind figures of fish. The setting could have been on the surface, and the characters live-action, and the movie would have been exactly the same. Well, except for a few bits of comedy here and there, the underwater setting was completely irrelevant. Now, if the characters are essentially humans, how accurate would the biological aspects of the characters be? Oscar doesn't even move like a fish. He has eyebrows and wears bling bling.
But that was merely something that irked me. The story made me think I had wasted my time. I was going to put that there were spoilers here, but I don't think there's anything to spoil. After all, this isn't a deep movie in any way, and we all know what happens in the typical cliché movie about a guy who strikes it rich through a lie. We also know what happens when somebody who likes that person is introduced into the storyline. Add your typical "different" theme (a homosexual among the homophobic is my favorite example) sprinkled with mafia references throughout, and that's the entire story.
As I mentioned above, this is supposed to be a comedy. Most people would call it an adult comedy, though there's no cursing (poopy-head, I think, was the worst it got). More accurately, it is a children's ghetto comedy. I don't have anything against black comedies per se, but to me, they're all the same, with the same overused humor, the same themes, and the same, predictable endings. This movie is exactly that. Basically, if this movie was released during any other time of the year, it would have probably done marginally better than Soul Plane, and only because it was computer animated rather than live action.
There are several redeeming qualities. For example, the obscure references here and there are interesting. The comedy that actually involves fish can be funny at times. The technical aspects, including the graphics, are particularly notable. The voicing was done well. But these are nothing in terms of what makes a movie good compared to the story. After all, movies are supposed to tell a story, and if the story a movie tells is bad, then the movie can't be too much better.
Keep your money for The Incredibles, and go to a bowling alley to hang out instead.