Pacquiao vs. Dinoshark

Manny Pacquiao is a Filipino boxer who was fighting a Ghanaian boxer on HBO pay-per-vie Saturday night. "Dinoshark" is a made-for-TV movie on the SyFy network about a shark that is apparently also part dinosaur. It aired Saturday night.

So two bold competitors were duking it out, with my personal happiness (and endorsement) as the prize. Let's look at the tale of the tape:

Manny Pacquiao is 5'7" and fights as a welterweight. He's something like 53-3. Despite no significant reach advantage, he is an offensive machine, relentlessly pummeling opponents and often absorbing massive amounts of punishment as he looks for openings in their guard. His opponent was a fill-in, but the guy seemed both taller and more defined than Manny. At full length, the fight would be about 45 minutes.

Dinoshark stars the guy who played Milo on the first season of "24," and even though it was in high definition, it appeared to be shot with a high-end consumer camcorder. It is an offensive machine, relentlessly pummeling viewers with a CGI shark that you could probably whip together yourself using iPhone apps. It runs 120 minutes with commercials.

Too close to call on paper. So what about known weaknesses?:

Manny Pacquiao was saddled with a truly horrible undercard. Going by appearances, everyone fighting appeared to be either a child molester or mentally impaired in some way. It's like someone went to a Mexican jail and said, "hey, we're totally willing to let that incident with the school bus blow over, IF you fight a slow Irish guy crippled by fetal alcohol syndrome on pay television." In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of the originally planned fighters must have eaten from the same hotel buffet and gotten some kind of parasite just hours before the event, and so the Mexican penal system was called on to save the day.

Now, ultimate fighting has some crappy undercards on its shows, but those matches are short. The apparent plan of everyone on the Pacquiao undercard was to bore their opponent to death in the 12th round. Also, no one ringside at 95 percent of boxing matches (i.e. the people you see on TV) seems to care about anything happening in the ring. That's a full three percent worse than the NBA. Boxing is a horrible, dead sport.

Dinoshark has commercial breaks, which makes it easy to flip away from Dinoshark. I won't lie: I missed large chunks of Dinoshark, including about 40 minutes where me and my brothers played Wii Sports Resort. So I can't tell you how Dinoshark got from Alaska all the way down to Southern California. I'm thinking he was frozen in a glacier and global warming somehow unleashed. Also, it bears repeating that Dinoshark has computer effects worse than those on 1980s Nickelodeon gameshows. Most shots of Dinoshark are a digitally added fin in the middle of a boat's wake, so that they can save money by not having to digitally ripple the water. Also, when Dinoshark eats a whole boat (he does this several times), there is no wreckage. It just sort of blinks off the water. This could just be a testament to the awesome power of Dinoshark, but I'm thinking it was tied to the $75,000 shooting budget. Of which $12,500 was probably tied up in Milo from "24." I guess the guy who played Chase in season 3 turned it down. Finally, Dinoshark relies on a lot of hand-held camera shots, so even on land the picture constantly sways. I guess a tripods turned it down.

Any great matchup has intagibles. This is no different:

Manny Pacquiao (or someone who knows him) arranged to have the national anthem of the Philippines sung by the Filipino Steve Perry sound-alike who currently tours with "Journey." This was pretty awesome. Also, because the fight was at Cowboys Stadium, both Jimmy Johnson, Jerry Jones and Barry Switzer were visible in the crowd shots. This was amusing at first, until we remembered that Jimmy Johnson is the new spokesman for Extenze, and then it just became a disturbing distraction. Does Jimmy Johnson have gambling debts? Or does Extenze have so much money they can get anyone? And if it's the latter, where is Extenze getting its money? Are people actually buying Extenze? You see the dilemma.

Dinoshark was preceded by "Spring Break Shark Attack," so we were in danger of shark attack fatigue. But Dinoshark also had a script which read (and was acted) sort of like a soft-core porno, except that at the spots were people would start doing sexual things, Dinoshark would attack. That's a very big positive.

And as for the fights themselves?

Manny Pacquiao wins by unanimous decision. He didn't lose a round. He threw something like 1,200 punches and his opponent threw, oh, eight. Seriously, his strategy was: "I will let a great boxer punch me 1,000 times, while not counterattacking at all." I admit that getting punched 1,000 times by Filipino is not easy, and I could not do it (at least with consciousness for the duration). But I am pretty sure that 45 seconds of Manny Pacquiao inverting my nose while I try to land one solid punch would be reasonably entertaining to a crowd. At the very least, if I had lost the first 11 rounds, I would come out in the 12th doing arm windmills, or emulating someone from "Mike Tyson's Punchout." But hey, I'm a showman.

Dinoshark kills an awful lot of people, but Milo gets revenge by ... wait for it ... riding directly at Dinoshark on a jetski, then jumping the jetski off a wave, then leaping from the jetski mid-air, as Dinoshark is leaping toward Milo, then throwing a grenade that blows up part of Dinoshark's gills. And you think Milo won, right? Not quite. As Milo lays in the water, Dinoshark resurfaces and stars slowly advancing on the surface toward Milo, flapping his teeth like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. At which point Milo's love interest shows up on a boat, says "Welcome to the endangered species list, you bastard," and shoots Dinoshark in the eye with a harpoon gun. I realize that killing a one-of-a-kind animal would actualy REMOVE it from the endangered species list, but you have to really see the movie to appreciate how great her delivery is.

Also, at one point in the final sequence, Dinoshark leaps straight out of the water like a SeaWorld dolphin show and picks a parasailer clean out of a harness. The complete harness stays in tact and keeps flying; the guy is removed without breaking the apparatus at all.

Dinoshark in a knockout. It's not even close.

Tags: movies