You already know who Tommy Wiseau is, so I’ll skip the biography. What I won’t skip is The Room— the best bad movie ever made, the pinnacle of so-bad-it’s-good, my guiltiest of guilty pleasures—and, buddy, is it a fucking miracle: laughing in the face of its own transgressive nature, subversion of mainstream standards, and ability to make literally every wrong creative choice there could’ve been, with the most memeable dialogue ever. And yet somehow, through sheer force of its own catastrophic nature, it clawed its way to a cult status so legendary in every aspect of the word, that it brings relevancy back to the term “It needs to be seen to be believed”. Now don’t ask why, but I have been obsessed with keeping up to date with the release of his next big disasterpiece, “Big Shark” since the decade began—only to find it had a blink-and-you-miss-it limited theatrical run back in 2023 and only just now hit streaming.
And yeah, I can definitely see why. He actually made something worse than The Room….and worst part is, I can’t even enjoy it unironically this time.
I can never put my finger on how, but there’s always something so hypnotic and hypnotizing about the way Tommy Wiseau directs literally anything, and here is no different. Seeing him trying to “lead” and/or block certain scenes, stitch together a vision? It’s like watching a child trying to run a heart monitor with Double A batteries, the whole thing sputtering and skipping, yet somehow still producing this jagged, arrhythmic pulse you can’t look away from. And keep in mind, this is only his second directorial/writing/producing/whatever you want to call this fever dream of a production. The man actually regressed, and all that’s left is this flailing, self-indulgent masturbatory gesture that, yes, is very entertaining….to a fault.
I guess visual consistency is one thing, so the fact that this actually does take place in New Orleans is something I’ll give Stephanie Do Ouro credit for with her production design. There is something about the humid, bruised beauty of New Orleans that lingers like a ghost in the background throughout here, and for a moment, it does make for a rather oblique reference to how vulnerable the city is to flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but that is a far, far reach. All of this is just window dressing in the end, no matter how quirky or offbeat it strives to be. Instead, it comes off as weightless and flimsy even with the few occasional tidbits of cultural respect they give to certain locations.
Props to this movie for trying to stay within the confines of its already limited budget and by following a more marketable trend, but it often strains itself to PowerPoint levels of last-minute cheapness. We’re dealing with a presentation that’s practically a home video with less production quality, passion, and talent than your average YouTuber or influencer, but is very obviously intended to be this reactive bad-on-purpose jokefest. Still, it gets to a point where being substantially below the level of a college humor sketch doesn’t sell well enough, especially when the people shooting the action come off more like they’re in a hostage situation. Christian Schulz and Cassiano Pereira had a tough go-around with their combined cinematography; when we’re not parading through the actual on-location shooting in New Orleans, everything else looks like it was shot in a potato’s basement. Half the time, the shot composition comprises incredibly basic stock footage loading screens while sometimes reusing the same shots ad nauseam; lighting changes drastically within the same scene, and mise en scène is nowhere to be found here.
Apologies to Hunter Thomas here for what I’m about to do….but the editing is fucking atrocious; there is literally no build-up, segue to, or interlude into literally any scene here. I’m convinced this entire movie was assembled out of order on a really bad day and Tommy didn’t bother overseeing it; entire sequences are played out of order, time stutters forward and backward without logic, and every scene (and I DO MEAN EVERY SCENE) is spliced together like those annoying DramaBox and PocketDrama shorts ads that keep popping up on YouTube—abrupt transitions AHOY.
Not to mention, they JUST. KEEP. DRAGGING. ON.
Clocking in at 5 minutes longer than The Room, the pacing here…..might as well not exist. It’s as slow as molasses here, like you’re stuck with cement boots and anchors tied around your ankles before being submerged into rising quicksand. I had to tap out at the 32:40 minute threshold and STILL struggled to drag myself through the rest of the remaining 104 minutes. Nearly all the visual effects might as well be mugging us with their cheap digital frames, poorly rendered SyFy level-grade CGI or shoddy green screen; focus is nigh-nonexistent so it can’t hold anything long enough to make you care about any of it; it taps into the same well of “humor” as The Room, but with less novelty value the second time around; tension, stakes, and urgency are but a distant pastime in this bizarro reality, and kudos for trying something new but Wiseau has no idea how to craft an action set piece—packing all the escalation and payoff of someone slowly closing a refrigerator door. Admittedly, or begrudgingly in my case, there is an oddball charm present in how much the tone pinballs between so many modular imbalances with very little class. Melodrama, deliberate camp, mawkish cringe that, at the very least, is more outwardly embracing of its status as a B-movie and the type of theatrical sovereignty that demands interplay with an audience.
Originally, this movie had no proper musical composition; Greg Sestero had to urge Tommy to add background tracks and a concluding music scene to the final cut, and from what I’ve heard, it is the recursive definition of “phone it in”. Every track I did hear was stock and felt ripped directly off the Unity Asset Store. Sound mixing/sound design is appallingly inconsistent from Kathryn Willa Rose, Scott Larmann and company—the refusal to use SFX, non-diegetic music, or even to overlay sound from one shot over another is admirable, but results in numerous shots that ring with unnatural, ill-fitting silence; the costume design is also alarmingly imprecise due to how sporadic the editing is, and I don’t think I can square dance my way around this Trojan Horse of a rating; despite the abhorrent amount of fake CG blood, this still counts as a PG-13 rating, but even then, it’s only in the faintest sense of the word.
How do I best describe the performances: hammy, stiff, awkward, does it really matter? Every gesture is either three sizes too big or painfully small, every emotional beat lands like a dropped anvil, and the sheer lack of chemistry makes you wonder if they met each other five minutes before rolling camera….yet you can tell everyone’s trying to have fun. But how could they salvage this when the dialogue is expectedly, weirdly Wiseauian with its weird inflections and improvisation that oozes alien syntax, on top of characterization that begins and ends with “delusional mind” or “You’re occupying my brain”? Seriously, everybody here has the personality of cardboard whose mouths you want to staple shut; the female characters in particular here are obnoxious harpies once again, this time with less agency. They barely even count as characters here because apparently, if a woman isn’t tearing Wiseau apart, Lisa, he doesn’t know what to do with her.
Lord help me, the only person here who seems to actively be trying is Isaiah LaBorde—somehow finding real commitment and energy to a sloppy and incoherent script that gave him absolutely nothing to work with. He held onto it for dear life and never wavered; bravo to him. Meanwhile, Tommy Wiseau.….he’s just his usual eccentric, weird, slurry, screamy self, endlessly self-aggrandizing himself to play in on whatever joke he thinks is happening.
How do I explain the logistical crucibles of why this narrative, THIS ONE, broke me more than The Room did? Well, putting aside the rather depressing reality that this has a better sense of where to take its story, unlike The Room, which was a twinge bit more unpredictable than this, it's as if Wiseau decided to mix a John Cassavetes film with Birdemic: Shock and Terror, but with a shark instead of birds. But really, it all comes across like somebody trying to rip off the Three Stooges after seeing the worst episode of their televised run and again, you’re having this be written by someone whose looks like they’d try to hot-wire a hearse while reading a waterlogged copy of Screenwriting for Dummies that’s missing every other page and his first rule to anything is chuck the entire playbook down the incinerator. Everything he touches is destined to look, feel, sound and play out wrong.
It’s the ultimate “Fuck around and find out” story imaginable where nothing happens, and nothing matters; our titular heroes just dick around playing pool, talking garbage, breaking into impromptu musical numbers, getting shitfaced on the job, literally anything that doesn’t actively cohere to a reliable three-act structure because it doesn’t even bother hiding how there is no sense of narrative structure or spatial logic. No real plot, just a shamble of incidents followed by me laughing my ass off whenever Sharknado’s giant distant half-cousin’s stepson slides or crashes in like it’s body-surfing on a Slip-n-Slide. Until that point, the name of the game might as well be “fake it all the way through” and whenever it HAS to advance the plot, it practically goes out of its way to circle itself and chase its own tail…..and that’s when I started getting restless and quickly bored.
My best guess, MY BEST GUESS as to what all of this is meant to thematically entail—and believe me, it fights you every step of the way—is so fleeting the film actively goes out of its way to address everything BUT THAT. It almost comes across as this allegory for the aimlessness and arrested development of the modern male drift. These guys swagger around with bold attitudes and bravado as a facade for underlying insecurity and inaction, always proclaiming goals they never quite reach, with the big shark representing the chaos of the world and its perception as impending doom in broadcast reaction but an inconvenience when it actually shows up. Of course, none of that actually congeals into any thematic undercurrent; no explanation for why the shark is there, no attempt at scientific justification, no environmental commentary beyond the accidental visual echoes of Katrina that I already mentioned and all that it leaves you is a metric shit-ton of questions. Why does it fall on three firemen to save the city? Why is no one else doing anything about the shark? Why the hell did the National Guard and the army back out almost immediately when it was convenient? Why do the firefighters frequently interrupt their shark-hunting plans for beer pong and clumsy fights with their girlfriends? Why do they keep repeating things they’ve already said, and holding atonal sing-alongs that would put Rebecca Black to shame? Why would they frighten me into thinking they’d kill actual pigs during the runtime before chickening out? Why pray tell am I asking all of these questions if the film had spent minutes upon minutes actively proving none of them matter?
I DON’T KNOW, YOU TELL ME!
But this, I think, out of everything here, is the main reason why I can’t give this the same pass as his previous works: that warped, misjudged sincerity and entitled sense of belligerence that made The Room so uniquely endearing has either eroded, calcified completely, or overflowed to such an extent that it’s just no longer funny to laugh at. This is the final cut of the movie, and it is still blatantly unfinished in the way only autopilot and nihilism can leave behind; it never really tries to be anything, and the few things it does try to be are executed so abhorrently that the novelty wears off and takes the enjoyment out of how bad it is considerably quickly. This is where it once again clicked for me that ‘Yeah, this man is a pitiful narcissist,’ and there are few things I hate more in this world than a narcissist with its head shoved up his own ass. He is capable of the kind of self-reflection required to make great art on purpose, but because he’s too arrogant to improve his craft, he obeys the letter of their criticism without bothering to understand the spirit.
But then again, what the hell do I expect from someone whose creative process resembles a toddler trying to assemble IKEA furniture while high on cough syrup?
Look, I know there’s no point in assessing this by conventional standards since this isn’t a conventional movie, but I gotta say it like it is: “Big Shark” is an unfinished hilarious riot of a disaster—a corrupted file where everything looked like the Glitch Gremlin paved over it—doubling down on all Tommy’s worst traits as a filmmaker while simultaneously muting the idiosyncrasies that makes his features weirdly captivating. Whether it be affirmation or a slow, public collapse of Tommy Wiseau’s myth, the result is the same as before: I won’t forget this.
