Crawl
- Stuck somewhere between Jaws 2 and Lake Placid, this mediocre creature feature never finds its sea legs.
Full Disclosure: I wasn’t thrilled about seeing this film from the get-go. The premise looked dumb, but not the entertaining, Sharknado kind of dumb. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it going in, but I tried to keep an open mind since it was receiving general praise.
Review
A collegiate swimmer at Florida University braves the dangers of a Category 5 hurricane in Gainesville in order to rescue her estranged father. Seems OK. Not great, but OK. Wait! I know! Let’s throw in some killer gators with an insatiable appetite for human flesh! Perfect! Is there a script? No? Fuck it! We’ve got hurricanes, alligators, and family drama! What else do we need?
That's how I imagine the good folks at Paramount Pictures hatched this inane horror movie. While it has its moments, Crawl suffers from a terminal case of lack of direction. It tries to be everything at once, which means it’s nothing in the end. Is it a disaster film or a horror? Is it meant to be serious or campy? Intimate family drama or a large scale allegory for the dangers of climate change? The tone is all over the place, which makes this 87 minute feature feel like a weeklong slog through mosquito infested Swampland, USA.
Killer gators with an agenda. Drive electric cars, or they’ll getcha!
While running three minutes short of the standard movie minimum of an hour and a half, I was shocked at how poorly paced Crawl was. While being flooded by an overkill of exposition and backstory, I was impatiently waiting for the actual flooding and killing to start. It’s a killer gator movie. Where are the fucking gators!? As it turns out, the wait wasn't worth it. The CGI-rendered prehistoric relics of the Cretaceous period looked like shit. When the entire movie is centered around the believability of these beasts, you’d think they’d take a bit more time and money to make them look better than what you see on SyFy on a Saturday morning. Their movement was stilted and unnatural, their look was corny, and their glowing yellow eyes were more laughable than unsettling. Lead actors Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper tried admirably, but failed to act convincingly against what I imagine were tennis balls on sticks while filming. I laughed quite a few times in Crawl actually, but for all the wrong reasons (much to the annoyance of several of the more captivated moviegoers in the audience, I’m sure).
At least they adhered to my number one rule in life: No matter what sort of cataclysmic disaster hits, the dog is coming with us!
Even the kills were lame for the most part. In this kind of movie, nothing should take precedence over sitting down and brainstorming cool and creative ways for us to revel in the bloody extinguishing of one human life after another. Yes, there’s blood and gore galore, but nothing we haven’t seen before. These gators are also entirely inconsistent in their eating habits. With our main characters, the monsters stalk and sneak around, psychologically toying with their would-be victims. When it comes to poor Gas Station Robber #2 or Skittish EMT, however, the gators inhale them before they even see the bearers of their demise. The plot armor the three main characters (yes, I’m including the dog) are wrapped in is staggering, even for a movie like this. The two humans are constantly being bit, chomped on, and dragged underwater by the beasts, only to come out on the other end of the attack alive and (mostly) well. Get an arm gnawed off? Tough it out. In this movie, only pussies have the time to go into shock. Half your calf is in a gator’s belly? Stop whining and throw a tourniquet on the sucker. Never mind the fact that they are constantly wading through dirty swamp water. While they may have survived the alligators, these folks are doomed to die a horrible death from their surely infected wounds. If the filmmakers would’ve leaned into the inherent campiness of their story, rather than try to aim for “Jaws meets A Quiet Place”, this could have been a really fun summer popcorn movie. Unfortunately, it’s just a mediocre film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
Dramatic reenactment of me wanting this damn movie to end already.
5 Quick Hits
Olympic record holder Michael Phelps is the fastest swimmer to ever live. The highest speed he’s ever reached in the pool is 6 mph. A staggering speed, to be sure. The American alligator, however, would make a meal of him in an instant. They fairly easily reach 15mph in the water and can reach as high as 20mph if they mean business. The point is, the climactic chase scene where our severely wounded and exhausted hero outswims a pack of these man-eaters is, to put it delicately, complete bullshit. Apex predator, my ass.
I feel like the filmmakers used the term “Category 5 hurricane” just to make the stakes seem higher and the situation more dangerous. Other than the severe and rapid flooding, there is nothing about the storm in the film that would yield anything higher than a Cat-3. A Cat-5 would have torn that old shack of a house to shreds from the wind alone. In Crawl, the rain falls in a casual downpour, when in reality the rain would be blowing horizontally and the drops would feel like hypodermic needles pricking every inch of exposed skin. That’s never brought up. Those rescue choppers would never be sent in during a storm like that. It’d be suicide for the rescue workers. That’s the whole point of preemptive evacuation. The government has given you fair warning. If you stay in the evacuation zone, you’re on your own until the weather lets up.
Shit! I just realized I’ve put more work into researching this film than the actual filmmakers did! Do they not have Google at Paramount?
Man, does this hurricane know story structure or what? Just when things are at their bleakest, the eye of the storm gives our heroes a chance to escape. Then, just to give the audience one last jolt of contrived suspense, the eye passes and the storm resumes. The levees break and give our heroes a nice hang ten ride on a rickety twelve-foot fishing boat that, for all intents and purposes, should’ve shattered immediately. Flash floods are no match for impenetrable plot armor though.
Sugar the dog steals the show. She was the only character I cared about. I applaud the filmmakers for letting Sugar survive when the family pet is so often the first one to go in these movies. The only times I felt suspense in Crawl were the times when Sugar’s fate was in question.
