Delayed Reaction: Crawl

Premise: A young woman goes to rescue he injured father in the middle of a hurricane with alligators attacking them.

There's a dumb joke in the show Love, Victor in which one teen says she saw Jaws, and her assessment was "It's no 47 Meters Down, but it was pretty good". As tired as that kind of joke is, there is some truth to it. For as much as Jaws is credited with birthing the blockbuster era, at the end of the day, it was also a Best Picture nominee from the most commercially successful director ever, who also happens to have an enviable collection of Oscars and nominations. Jaws is a fun movie. 47 Meters Down is a stupid fun movie. There's no need to worry about artistic merit on that one. There's no recording of Johannes Roberts baffled on Oscar nomination morning that he lost a Best Director nomination to Fellini. It's a shark attack movie, and it breaks whatever logical rules it must to deliver that.

Crawl is a stupid fun movie too. I'm not sure if at any point I engaged the movie on an intellectual level. That would've ruined it. No, I turned this on for a movie about people fighting gators. And that's exactly what I got. It spends a little bit of time establishing the parameters. There's a hurricane about to hit, so the town is evacuated. Kaya Scodelario is a swimmer in college. Her family is broken and her dad never really got over that. Then is goes right into gators attacking anyone they see.

I love when movies work in limited spaces. This one is primarily set in one house: the basement in particular. The stakes and the obstacles are clear. At that point, it's just about letting some characters bounce off one another and try a few strategies to escape. The movie does a good job dividing itself into different obstacles or asides. I really like the short film within the movie about the looters getting attacked in the convenient store across the street.

The movie isn't perfect, of course. They could've done a better job laying out the geography of the basement. Too often, it felt like they just wrote in a new nook or wall whenever the story needed one. Scodelario's accent is not great if you focus too much on it. All the talk between her and her father (Barry Pepper) about being an apex predator is a little thematically on the nose. The CGI for the gators isn’t great. That's where you feel the budget restraints the most.

Crawl delivered what it promised though. If I want to see the auteur gator movie, I'll just track down Rampage.

Verdict:  Weakly Recommend