-REVIEW-000.gif)
Netflix dropped a shark movie called Thrash that I wasnt too sure to watch but still gave it a try, this was the back to back 7 of the weekend with Apex and Thrash, latter on I find out this movie went through so many name changes before landing on that title that people online were just calling it "the shark movie" and its not that complicated and everything is totally expected and predicatable from the trailer, there was nothing hidden here, no mistery no nothing, it was mostly about the kills tbh. The setup is a Category 5 hurricane named Henry slamming into a small coastal town in South Carolina called Annieville, the local levees break and flood the streets with a literal truckload of animal blood from a meatpacking truck that gets wrecked in the surge, perfect situation of fire and gas in the same place, blood and sharks, then the bull sharks show up for the buffet. Tommy Wirkola directed this and if you know his work from the zombie Nazi movie Dead Snow or the Christmas action thing Violent Night you already know how his brain works, so watching him spend the first hour playing it relatively straight before finally letting the chaos loose is too much to ask and a little frustrating because I thought we were coing to get less drama and more chaos, I mean the drama here was just for decoration. We get Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa, a nine months pregnant woman who gets forced to come into work and then becomes trapped in her electric car while trying to leave town, with floodwater rising around her and bull sharks circling, and Djimon Hounsou shows up as Dr. Dale Edwards, a marine researcher who is also the uncle of Dakota played by Whitney Peak, a teenager who cannot leave the house because her some kind of phobia she has, she decide to remain locked in after losing her mother, and then there are three foster kids stuck with a guardian who thinks a Category 5 hurricane is just bad weather.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32362890/
- Platform: NETFLIX
What actually works in this movie is Phoebe Dynevor doing everything she can with a role that does not give her much breathing room and she is the kind of performer who sells you on the fear without needing to scream every five seconds, you believe she is scared because the way she carries herself in those flooded scenes feels real in a way that a lot of streaming creature feature movies just do not bother to get right. Djimon Hounsou is Djimon Hounsou period, meaning the man grounds everything he touches and makes you believe in whatever absurd situation the script drops him into, even when he is racing toward town on a boat in the middle of a catastrophic storm to rescue his niece. The bull sharks circling in the dark water during certain sequences are actually decent for a streaming production, the CGI does not embarrass itself the way you expect it to, and the production design of the flooded sets is clever because they built interlocking environments where the water level rises as the story moves forward, removing levels of the buildings to sell the illusion that things are getting worse. There are moments where this thing is clearly trying to be a proper disaster movie and the craft behind those moments is legit enough that you can see what it was aiming for before it gets distracted by all the side drama stories going around.
The second half is where everything starts feeling scattered because the pacing cannot hold together once the movie realizes it needs to make you care about Dakota processing grief for her mother while also delivering Lisa baby and also dealing with sharks and also wrapping up the foster kids situation and also setting up some kind of message about climate and intensifying storms, its just too much going at the same time on a story that really feels short, and none of that gets the time it needs to actually connect or even make you care about it, you still locked in on the sharks and getting people eaten so this is where the movie goes insane action with sharks flying and giving babies birth under water like its nothing. The emotional weight around Dakota dealing with her loss is there in theory but it comes and goes so fast that it barely sticks with you before the next thing is already happening and the choice to spend that much of the screentime trying being serious about the disaster before finally letting the director be himself ends up costing the movie whatever personality it was hiding underneath. You can feel that Sony had something to do with making this thing behave for most of its runtime before it finally gets weird in the end, and that calculation doesnt do it any favors because the first hour is a drag when the person they hired to make this movie is someone who strapped a machine gun to a reindeer and called it a Christmas movie. Latter on I notice that there was a bit of Australian cast doing Southern accents something that also that just happens and it sounds off if you look around and see a small town with couple of red neck kinda scenery but I guess its fine, Im not an expert on accents and not that I care much about it, it does not kill the performances but it is one of those things that sits wrong in your ear every time someone opens their mouth.
Watching this reminded me a lot of Deep Blue Sea, which understood it was ridiculous and committed to that energy without flinching and also Crawl, which I think is the actual better version of this exact movie because Alexandre Aja kept everything focused on one story and one location without losing the thread. Thrash wants to be both of those things and also a serious disaster movie about climate and human survival, and the problem with wanting to be everything is that you end up being a slightly lesser version of each thing instead of really delivering on any of them. Adam McKay produced this through Hyperobject Industries and you can feel his disaster framing fingerprints in the background with the climate references and the storm surge setup but that is more of a tone thing baked into the world than anything that slows the movie down to make a point. The idea of Lisa giving birth inside Dakota flooding house as the structure collapses around her is insane on paper and the kind of sequence that should make this movie not easy to errase just form that scene but it arrives in a movie that spent too long pretending it did not want to be that kind of movie, so the landing feels half earned instead of completely ridiculous in the way it should be, its like the movie suddenly figure out where it was and hit the gas too late and end up been too ridiculous.
#thrash, #netflix, #sharkmovie, #horrorreview, #hurricanehorror, #bullsharks, #phoebedynevor, #djimonhounsou, #tommywirkola, #creaturefeature, #sharkattack, #moviereview, #streamingmovies, #survivalhorror, #southcarolina, #campyhorror, #bloodflood, #gore, #monstermovie, #sharkweek, #fosterkids, #pregnantlady, #cgi, #disastermovie, #sharks
Posted Using INLEO