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| Trimark Pictures | Release Date: April 21, 1995 |
Starring:
Benicio Del Toro, Frank Whaley, Jerry Levine, Kevin Spacey, Matthew Flint, Michelle Forbes, Patrick Fischler, Roy Dotrice, Sabryn Genet, T.E. Russell
Summary:
A young, naive Hollywood studio assistant finally turns the tables on his incredibly abusive producer boss.
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Swimming With Sharks swipes its basic design from Robert Altman’s The Player: It’s yet another black satirical morality play about a yuppie climber who learns to be a killer. But since Guy, for all his ass-kissing resentment, isn’t really filled in as a character, our attention — and, in a curious way, our sympathy — shifts to the monster himself. When Spacey goes ballistic, only to freeze the nitroglycerine in his veins a moment later, you don’t want to look anywhere else.
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Within its very limited range, pic has verve, a fine control of tone and a stylish look given its low budget and three-week sked. Spacey dominates, but Whaley makes a convincing transition from goody-goody to icy insider, and Forbes manages well despite being forced to flip-flop on command between sarcastic bitchiness and softer intimacy.
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Swimming with Sharks is fine when it puts Buddy into outrageous play. But it stumbles in a few other places, requiring a pretty hefty suspension of disbelief - first at Guy's making it into his miserable job that many would kill for, then when he finds himself on the receiving end of romantic attentions. [09 June 1995, p.57]
In any future compendium of film clips from anti-Hollywood satires, Swimming With Sharks will surely be included. Several scenes are so incisive and well-written that they stand out as classics of their kind. [09 June 1995, p.H32]
George Huang's Swimming With Sharks purports to give us the goods on the big bad egos who run Hollywood, but it lacks both credibility and coherence. [06 May 1995]
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