Review of Swimming With Sharks

Introduction

I`d never seen this until now and was urged to by a long time friend and movie fan when he heard it was getting a DVD release. I`m a big Kevin Spacey fan and therefore jumped at the chance to get this review disc.

After doing a bit of surfing I found out that this was a fairly low budget movie that didn`t do too well on its theatrical release, and has now gained a bit of a cult following.

Video

A shabby non-anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer. It`s little grainy but clean. Colours are a bit muted and it does suffer from a small amount of macro blocking in darker scenes. Black and white contrast is good but we do get some bad haloing on the very bright whites.

Audio

A very harsh DD 2.0 stereo track that has far too much distortion. I have a decent set-up which really shows the flaws in the audio on this disc. The centre channel is far to quiet. The dial on my amp goes from 1 to 20 it barely goes past 5-6 on most movies. On this one I had to crank it up to 10 to hear the dialogue at a sensible level. The problem I had then was unbearably loud fronts with loads of hiss. Not good, not good at all!

Features

A nice informative commentary and a short 8 minute Kevin Spacey video profile with archive footage and interviews about his career to date. And the all important trailer!

Conclusion

A good, but not great movie with some top notch performances from the two main leads. It is let down in my eyes by a poor and depressing ending. The transfer is also weak and the audio is appalling.