Crawl

Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson, Jose Palma
Directed by: Alexandre Aja
Rating: R
Genre: Action, Drama, Horror
2019

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A woman (Kaya Scodelario) fights to save her father (Barry Pepper), who is trapped in an alligator-infested house during a category 5 hurricane.

Review:

Tim: I suppose Crawl gets some credit for the ambitious attempt to be both a hurricane movie AND an alligator movie. It's interesting to see these two horror/disaster elements combined. This is actually a pretty decent movie. It might ultimately be too farfetched to be good and Alexandre Aja isn't a talented enough director to really make this movie work, but you can do far worse than this film.

My favorite alligator/crocodile movie is Lake Placid, but this isn't a subgenre you see very often. So, it's automatically worth seeing this. I have to admit, I was pretty excited to hear about this film. Alligators are fairly frightening creatures when you think about it, so it immediately gives the film a certain level of excitement and fear. No one wants to be eaten alive by an alligator, and it was genuinely fun to see these characters fighting to survive against these forces of nature. It was a great addition to have this take place during a hurricane. Hurricane movies don't come along all that often (The Hurricane Heist was a disappointment) and I'm typically a fan of weather-related movies. I enjoyed this combination of a weather-related disaster movie with an animal-attack horror movie. It was a combination that actually made sense and it threw a whole lot at our characters for them to overcome. This interesting combination is the most compelling reason to see this film.

I really enjoyed the narrowed focus of this film on two main characters. There's a few other characters sprinkled in, but they very much exist on the periphery. This is a story about a young woman and her father, fighting to survive. It helps that they got solid actors like Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper for the roles (it also reunites them from Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. I've always liked Pepper and his performance is decent here. It's not always the most believable, but he's a worthwhile screen presence and I enjoyed him in the role. Scodelario feels like she has so much potential as an actress, but hasn't quite come into her own yet. There were moments in her performance here where you thought, "Wow, she can be really, really good someday." And then there were others where you were significantly less impressed. I will say that the script didn't do her many favors. As a whole, though, Scodelario was well cast and gives a strong performance. That's important because as mentioned, this movie is really about two characters, and Pepper is secondary for sure. This is Scodelario's movie and she delivers more often than she doesn't.

I appreciated the attempt to give the main character a backstory with her swimming. It actually makes a lot of sense and provides us with a reason she's able to survive in conditions that would result in most of our deaths. It also gives the characters some additional drama, when you understand her father's role in that. It adds a nice layer of complexity to these characters. The backstory is essential to understanding the characters and it makes the movie about slightly more than killer alligators. That was good. The problem is that Aja can't quite tell this story in a believable way. So much of it felt forced. You saw what they were trying to do, you could even see the intelligence of the idea in the script, but the execution was botched. I cringed and rolled my eyes at this aspect of the movie far more than any of the alligator or hurricane scenes. The human element of this story was critical and while the intentions to do the right thing were there, Aja just cannot pull it off. This ultimately sinks the movie- it would have probably been good had those sequences been less forced and obvious. The idea of this harrowing event giving the main character a chance to redeem her past and achieve some level of peace is a great one, but it doesn't come across as believable.

The visual effects were decent. There's a few scenes that don't look realistic and take you out of the action some. Fortunately, those are minimal. For the most part, they are good enough that you're not focused on it and instead pay attention to the story.

Crawl certainly won't be on my list of favorite alligator movies, but it's really a fairly decent film. A few flaws prevent it from achieving its full potential, but you should still feel good about this movie. It could have easily been a throwaway cash grab, but it felt like real effort was put forth all around. This movie has flaws, but it's worth seeing.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 6.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Lake Placid, The Hurricane Heist, Anaconda