Movie review: Shark Night 3D *

Stars: Sara Paxton, Dustin Milligan, Chris Carmack
Director: David R. Ellis
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Speciality Cinema week of Friday, September 2 – Friday 6:30|9:15pm; Saturday 6:45|9:30; Sunday 4:00|7:00pm; Monday 6:00|9:00pm; Tuesday-Thursday 2:30|6:30|9:15pm. For more information about film times, call 292-2135.
Runtime: 91 minutes
Horror/thriller

Director David R. Ellis has delivered a heartless, suspense-free 90 minutes of sharks dining out on kids stuck on an island in a Louisiana lake.

It's one of those magical movie locations: There's no cell reception, and while the power grid serves the island-mansion where the Tulane seven hang out, nobody thought to install a land line. With conditions like these, it's no wonder Louisiana has to give away the store in incentives to get Hollywood to film there.

The island on Lake Crosby is the home of the lovely Sara (Sara Paxton), and she's brought her friends - the fetching Maya (Alyssa Diaz) and the jock Malik (Sinqua Walls), nerdy pre-med Nick (Dustin Milligan), gameboy Gordon (Joel David Moore), tattoo-babe Beth (Katharine McPhee) and pretty boy Blake (Chris Zylka) to celebrate ... something.

But things instantly go wrong. Something takes a bite out of one. Then another. And since we've seen the opening credits, in which a random bikini bottom is snapped up by a shark, we know what that something is.

Stuntman-turned-director Ellis has journeyed from Snakes on a Plane to sharks on a lake. And without Samuel L. Jackson, we're stuck with humorless one-liners, colorless performances and perfunctory digital shark attacks. This situation demanded urgency in the editing and panic in the performances. He manages neither. 

Other characters include the beer-swilling sheriff (Donal Logue) and a couple of redneck fisherman who insult the black guy and leer at the girls. Joshua Leonard from The Blair Witch Project wears filed down teeth and something like an accent to play one of them. He's supposed to be a shark, I guess. 

Yeah, stuff flies at the camera - viscera and jaws and boat parts. The best 3D moment in Shark Night is a doozy of a boat wreck in the first act. The underwater photography is pretty, but even the dread that hangs over the movie's every aquatic moment feels watered down. There's one decent shock, but the movie lacks jolts, pathos or glee when this deserving character or that undeserving one becomes a shark snack.

It's tempting to look at every 3D bomb that's rolled out this summer as evidence of a fad that's faded. When good (and good-looking) 3D films such as Fright Night fail, what hope does Shark Night, a picture with zero ambition and almost no entertainment value, have of tempting us to shell out the extra bucks for those magic glasses?