Overly quirky, uber-dorky love story revolves around two nerdy souls and their eventual courtship through a series of underdeveloped though often heartfelt scenes. Writer-director Taika Cohen shows a certain talent for creating enduring eccentricities on screen but fails to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Many of Eagle vs Shark's brief scenes display a knack for the underlying subtlety present in such overtly bizarre characters, Cohen is simply too obsessed with the light-hearted weirdness of it all to make many of the scenarios stick with viewers.
Most resonance subsides afterwords simply because these two principal characters feel far too old to be acting as mentally immature as they do, in effect rendering much of this oddball character study indulgent and unrealistic. There are enough sincere bits and eccentric surprises thrown around to warrant a viewing by the indie-leaning younger crowd raised on Napolean Dynamite, but in the end Eagle vs Shark remained a glorified and overextended short, hardly transcending it's student film roots.
Most resonance subsides afterwords simply because these two principal characters feel far too old to be acting as mentally immature as they do, in effect rendering much of this oddball character study indulgent and unrealistic. There are enough sincere bits and eccentric surprises thrown around to warrant a viewing by the indie-leaning younger crowd raised on Napolean Dynamite, but in the end Eagle vs Shark remained a glorified and overextended short, hardly transcending it's student film roots.