1850. Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017)

Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Cassandra Scerbo

Director: Anthony C. Ferrante

Running Time: 95 mins

Sharknado 5: Global Swarming is an American film and the fifth in the Sharknado series. After a major Sharknado emerges in London, Fin and his family stand at the forefront of what soon becomes a worldwide catastrophe, as enormous Sharknadoes and more devastate every single country in the world.

What more did you expect? As the fifth film in the somehow still vibrant franchise, Global Swarming is easily the best of all, with a massive injection of money into the special effects and locations budget, as well as a good improvement in writing and overall humour. The performances still aren’t stunning, and there are still quite a few basic issues around and about, but what have you actually come here for? That’s right: pure insanity.

Up to this point, I’ve been a little hesitant at awarding the Sharknado movies points for being just so-bad-it’s-good movies. The first four films were increasinly entertaining, but still not an end-to-end laughter fest as they really should be.

Fortunately, however, Sharknado 5 is just about as close to that as I think we’re going to get. Doing away with any real story in exchange for more big action and celebrity cameos, this film is easily the most entertaining of the whole series, and although it’s not perfect at every moment, you’ll be hard pressed to not laugh at some of the most ridiculous moments throughout.

In truth, any film that features lines like ‘I think we just started World War Shark’, ‘Throw another shark on the barbie’ and ‘So you turned the Sharknado into a time machine?’, probably isn’t taking itself all that seriously, and that is the real beauty of this film, the fact that it doesn’t ever hold back when it comes to the most painfully silly and poorly thought-out ideas, but it makes for a massively entertaining watch.

For starters, the film’s complete disregard for the geography of the city of London (and Stonehenge) is a perfect opening act for all the silliness that ensues afterwards. For anyone who knows the city, it’s all entirely wrong, and when put together with some awful computer-generated images of some of the city’s landmarks being annihilated by Sharknadoes, I was absolutely laughing my socks off.

Following on from that, the mad excuses that the ‘story’ takes in order to jump around to as many countries as possible (UK, Switzerland, Australia, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Egypt and more) are just the icing on the cake to how ambitiously moronic this movie is. It’s pretty amazing to see how much money has been thrown at this, with the simple objective of making it as spectacularly stupid as possible, but it really makes a difference.

If you go back and watch the original Sharknado from 2013 after this, it looks like a comparative snail-fest with next to no action at all (apart from the chainsaw bit – that was great). However, that should just tell you how ridiculous this fifth film is, and there’s barely a moment where it stops for a breath.

However, there are a couple of moments where it does stop, and that’s where the film really falls down. As madly entertaining as it is, every time that it tries to introduce any degree of story or emotion, the fun gets completely wiped away, as it exposes just how bad the writing and acting here is at times. It’s far better than the likes of Oh Hell No!, which featured long and tedious periods of non-shark chomping action, but there’s still a couple of moments where this can drag.

On the whole though, this is a Sharknado movie. It’s the biggest and maddest one of all – and that’s why it’s easily the best of the series, so I’ll give it a 6.6.