rewrite this title Above & Below trailer: Antonio Banderas is a cartel villain in new shark attack movie

Another day, another shark movie. Is there any other sub-genre that has become quite so prolific? Aura Entertainment has dropped a new trailer for Above & Below, which stars Oscar-nominated actor Antonio Banderas. There’s certainly a history of acclaimed actors appearing in shark movies; I’m often reminded of Michael Caine, who starred in Jaws: The Revenge and famously said:

“I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.“

Above & Below

The film follows a group of friends whose dream vacation of parties and diving takes a terrifying turn when they accidentally discover cartel cocaine at sea. Banderas plays the main baddie—a cartel leader who takes over their boat and leaves several of the friends trapped in a shark cage below the water, forcing them to retrieve a bag of drugs from the seafloor.

I was fully prepared to roll my eyes at this one, and while it’s no Jaws (but what is?), it does look fun in a trashy way. Plus, Banderas always lends a certain gravitas to his villainous proceedings.

Cast & Crew

Director: Jesse V. Johnson

Writer: Anthony Steven Giordano

The Cast: Christina Ochoa, Laura Marano, Timothy V. Murphy, Louis Mandylor, Jess Liaudin, Ryan Bertroche, Ramiro Alonso, Diego Llinás, Rodrigo Poisón, Mario Tardón, and Donncha Tynan.

Above & Below swims into select theaters on July 29.

Shark Movies

Although shark movies existed long before Jaws, the massive success of Steven Spielberg’s classic helped turn them into a genre all their own, one that Hollywood has been circling ever since. And really, who can blame them? There’s something irresistibly primal about the idea of being stranded in open water with something you can’t reason with just below the surface. Unfortunately, for every scrappy B-movie gem, there are plenty of shark flicks that belong at the bottom of the ocean.

This year alone, our resident shark-attack movie fanatic, Tyler Nichols, has already reviewed three entries in the genre: Renny Harlin’s Deep Water, Netflix’s Thrash, and Chum, the latter of which he singled out for its dreadful AI-driven VFX.

“Chum utilizes footage of real sharks, but has a hard time keeping the shark type being shown consistent. Then it mixes that real footage with some of the most insane FX I have ever witnessed,” he wrote in his review. “It goes from just casually mixing footage together to a moment that feels straight out of the Shark Attack franchise. The filmmakers clearly used AI for its post-production, and it makes every attack look awful. There’s a strange floaty quality to most of the victims, and they seem to just put their limbs in the shark’s mouth. It may be passable at a glance when using the real shark footage, but it goes off the rails when a shark is doing something that they don’t have archived footage for.“