2023, Adrian Grunberg (Rambo: Last Blood) -- Amazon
Paul Sturges (Josh Lucas, Ford v Ferrari) is in backwater Mexico with his family on a work thing. He is a safety inspector for an oil company and his latest job takes him near a town where he & his wife stayed on their honeymoon and he has dragged them all along. The idea is do a quick inspection, sign off and then enjoy the picturesque little town. A family reconnect.
Except the town is not as pretty as he remembers. Things are closed down, somewhat dilapidated and there are intimidating thugs everywhere. The pretty little hotel they stayed in previously has closed, so Paul decides to just do the quick inspection while his family waits at a local cantina. While he heads to the marina to grab a hired boat to the rig, and his family is harassed by the thugs.
I should also mention that everyone they talk to is going on about the wrath of a ancient Mexican deity, and a curse. "They dug too deep" as the genre movie saying goes. The hired boat only takes Paul so far... a raft where a smaller boat awaits him. He does get to the rig bug finds it eerily empty and.... well, falling apart. Meanwhile on shore, his frantic family runs to the marina and throws a wad of cash at a fishermen who, against his better judgement, takes them to the rig.
Good, we now have everyone on the rig. Paul has met the last two survivors, fearful men who speak of the curse again. And hand Paul a pair of binoculars. He watches the fisherman depart where he is attacked by a Big Fucking Shark. This is why the rig is (mostly) empty and why there are no boats. The Curse placed upon them by an Old God has resurrected an ancient megalodon to take its wrath out on the rig and the town.
The rest of the movie is tense, terrified people being tense and terrified. Paul has some magic tricks up his sleeve which will involve going into the water. Cuz safety inspectors understand all the meticulous nuances of an battered old oil rig, better than the men who worked on it. The Big Fucking Shark, or the Curse, also has an unsettling effect on the people causing anger, paranoia and hallucinations. The magic trick does work, but at the cost of one of the workers, and also reveals that Paul has been faking the safety reports for years, allowing the place to go on polluting the environment long after it should have been shut down. Paul is the cause of the Old God's Curse. Paul must atone!
It wasn't dumb enough to be fun, and not fun enough to be enjoyable. It wasn't even bad enough to be turned off, which is what I am doing more of lately. Like I used to finish even bad books, I used to finish even terrible movies. But there are far too many movies in my hopper to waste time on them. But this one was able to keep my attention long enough to finish. It could have been better, but I don't think anyone doing the movie cared enough to do so, and even went so far to relegate to shark itself to a barely supporting role.
The latest movie I turned off was 57 Seconds which had an interesting time-travel macguffin premise but was just so fucking boring I couldn't cope.
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