Did you like Crawl? Do you want to watch Crawl but with bull sharks, directed by the same man who brought us Dead Snow and Violent Night, instead? Well, then Netflix has a movie for you.
Is it a good movie? I genuinely don’t know. It’s a competent one with a budget high enough that it never feels cheap. It’s very good at Putting Characters in Situations and then letting those situations play out. And it is at times genuinely funny, like when a reporter completely ignored what Dale was saying so that he could push his sensationalist story instead.
Your suspension of disbelief is definitely going to need to do some heavy lifting. There’s a throwaway line about how the hurricane intensified into a Category 5 (would be a Category 6 if it went up that high!) storm at the last possible second, but the idea of people working less than an hour before landfall when there is an evacuation order in place is a little ridiculous.
But this is a shark attack movie, and that almost always requires you to go with the plot a little. The real problem is that Thrash has no idea what tone it wants to take.
It starts off fairly serious. Dakota’s initial scenes where she tries to leave her house only for her agoraphobia to send her right back inside were treated seriously and carried some emotional weight. (Whitney Peak overall is very strong here.) That was a very reasonable explanation for why she hadn’t evacuated, and I was excited to see what the movie might do with it.
By the end, though, it turned into something very cheesy and comedic. This is different from being funny. A movie can be funny without straying into comedy conventions and tropes. It started to turn more into a comedy, and a dumb one at that. Like “of course, dynamite is going to stay lit when you throw it into the water” levels of dumb. It felt like the last thirty minutes had a completely different writer.
It also felt like it was two movies stitched together because they couldn’t stretch either idea out enough to fill enough runtime. Dakota, Lisa, and Dale are in one movie, and foster siblings Ron, Dee, and Will are in a second movie. There is absolutely zero overlap between them. They do not interact with each other at all.
I really didn’t like the siblings. They got the worst writing, full to the brim with lazy cliches and nonsensical events and actions. It also didn’t help that I never felt like the stakes were real with them, fully confident that they wouldn’t kill off or even seriously injure a kid.
If there was one thing that the movie was not competent in, it was the editing. There are several glaring continuity errors, many of which are in those last thirty minutes that I didn’t love. It made things feel just a bit lazy.
The bull sharks generally looked good, though. They were clearly CGI, but they moved well and we got to see them often. Nellie, the great white, looked significantly more fake. She didn’t look bad exactly, just very clearly not real when they were obviously shooting for realism. Maybe I’m just spoiled from all of the practical effects that we’ve gotten so far.
I wasn’t able to find a ton of production information, but it did look like the actors spent a lot of time genuinely in the water, though, which I appreciated. The scenes when Lisa was stuck in her car were genuinely tense.
So again: is this a good movie? Maybe not. Is it a good shark attack movie? Ultimately, yes. It wouldn’t crack into my Top Ten list, but it might linger in my Top 25.
Random Thoughts
Djimon Hounsou was incredibly underutilized as he almost always is.
Apparently, there is footage of bull sharks attacking hippos (and hippos chasing sharks off).
Another movie following an Unofficial Billie’s Rule of Television: A pregnant woman during a natural disaster will give birth at the absolute worst time.
Okay, but seriously, go watch Crawl. If you enjoy these kinds of movies, it’s a genuinely good rendition of it.
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.
Thank you for a great review! I have been wanting to watch this and I am going to do just that and come back and reread this. :)
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