Freak weather system ace Fin (Ziering) is in Washington to receive an honour from the US President (Cuban) when sharks rain down, destroying all key monuments in minutes. So Fin drives to join his pregnant wife April (Reid), holidaying in Orlando with her mother (Derek) and their teen daughter Claudia (Newman). En route, Fin reconnects with fellow shark-fighter Nova (Scerbo) and her assistant Lucas (Muniz). But the growing sharknados are creating a wall that threatens the entire eastern seaboard. And the only hope may be Fin's astronaut dad Gil (Hasselhoff) and a mothballed Space Shuttle.

Even for this franchise, the plot is almost head-spinningly insane, as Ferrante and writer Levin ignore the vaguest whiff of internal logic to indulge in one flatly ludicrous action set-piece after another. Sharks attack from the sky with uncanny precision, targeting characters at exactly the right moment as our heroes battle them with guns, supersonic jets, space lasers and of course lots of chainsaws. Thankfully, amid the nonsense the cast and crew inject a stream of genuinely hilarious gags.

The filmmakers continue to stretch their idiotic joke premise with inventively deranged dialog and outrageously nutty action moments. And the cameo cast is as riotous as always, including Anthony Weiner as the Nasa director, Jackie Collins as Fin's biggest fan and Michele Bachmann managing to be unconvincing as herself. Meanwhile, Ziering and Reid continue to indulge in wacky physical stuntwork while somehow maintaining straight faces.

Most enjoyable is the fact that no one is safe in these movies, and once again being swallowed by a shark doesn't necessarily mean that you're dead (the movie's biggest gag shows just the opposite). But it would help if Ferrante knew how to direct even the most basic scenes, adding a tiny hint of coherence to the chaos. And the jokey ending, asking the audience to cast a vote for one character's fate in the next movie, might be the moment this franchise, ahem, jumped its own shark.

themes, violence

16.Jul.15