Dangerous Animals Review

Every shark movie lives in the shadow of Jaws. While not the first, it had an immediate and lasting impact on movie culture and the industry. For one, it spawned a bunch of imitators, most of which failed to make any impression, much less a comparable one. Even once that initial wave subsided, and shark movies were free to go back to doing their own thing with the ocean’s fiercest predators, no one has managed to make another classic. Instead, we have a bevy of films enjoyable for their over-the-top execution and cheese factor, not quality. Their goal is having some fun, leading to a wide variety of personal favorites (mine’s Deep Blue Sea). The specific flavor of bombast Dangerous Animals brings to the table is a schlocky serial killer flick in which sharks are the murder weapon.

Tucker (Jai Courtney) is a boat captain on Queensland’s Gold Coast who spends his days running shark tours, dispensing shark facts, and musing about the ways humanity is destroying ocean habitats. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is an American running away from her life back in the States by surfing the waves of Australia all day and sleeping in her van at night. After a cold open that sees Greg (Liam Greinke) stabbed and thrown overboard by Tucker before he locks up Heather (Ella Newton) below deck, we know Zephyr will end up on his boat one way or another. It’s just a question of how will it all play out. Normally careful to only abduct loners, Tucker’s unaware that Zephyr made a connection with Moses (Josh Heuston) the night before, who’s unlikely to let go of the best thing that’s happened to him in quite some time.

That’s all well and good, but the movie takes its sweet time getting Zephyr onto Tucker’s boat. It wants to ensure we understand the bond her and Moses share over surfing, that he feels cooped up in his real estate job, and that she is a drifter with commitment issues. This could be a fine way to get us invested in their survival before the monster is let loose on them. It’s occasionally amusing, such as their meet-cute: he spots her shoplifting a pint of Ben & Jerry’s inside of a slushy. But given their character traits were pulled out of a hat, and their dialog is bland and predictable, the time we spend with them is not very engaging. We don’t come out of it feeling particularly warm towards either. Harrison and Greinke are fine, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with, and neither possess the talent to turn pablum into gold.

It doesn’t get much better on the boat. We see Zephyr’s bottomless determination, as she absolutely refuses to give up on the prospect of escape. She uses anything she can get her hands on to pick the lock of the handcuffs that bind her and Heather to separate beds, and rarely stops making noise in the hopes someone, anyone, will hear her. Her persistence leads to not one, not two, but three separate foot chases during the third act. Her resourcefulness is endlessly impressive, but each successive sequence is less effective, providing fewer surprises. That’s a problem, because most viewers probably guessed the ultimate finale before the movie began, so the action needs to keep our attention while leading us there. Repetition is not the way to do it.

Granted, the screenplay is more concerned with making its point than elegance, which is respectable enough. If only it was particularly poignant. Zephyr’s actions are that of a prey animal, including a truly gnarly display of self-preservation to escape captivity. This situates Tucker as a predator, and human beings more broadly as the titular “dangerous animals”. It dovetails with his earlier rants about the presence of humans messing up the delicate ecological balance in the oceans, and supports his view that sharks aren’t vicious, they’re just hungry animals. None of this is revelatory, but writer Nick Lepard deserves some credit for successfully tying his ideas together fairly cleanly.

We’re really here for the shark violence. What the film is lacking in quantity it makes up for in quality. Its copious gore is not for the faint of heart, and includes multiple severed limbs and torn flesh. It doesn’t all look great, and we never see the sharks actually chomping down on their victims, but it does a reasonably good job wielding implication and tension and the characters’ fear to make it all work. Some of the shark behavior is baffling (consistency-wise, that is; realism is irrelevant here), letting the air out of the bag in a few cases as the expected plot armor slips into view. But by and large, their terror is your terror.

The real stand out of the whole experience is Courtney. Tucker is a weirdo, and not just for his anti-social behavior. He’s Clint from Jaws after being driven mad by years of serving tourists. We never learn how he got this way, and the unknowability of his past makes him all the more scary. Tucker’s intensity makes him immediately off-putting, which he tries to soften with a genial and boisterous demeanor that just makes him more threatening. Courtney uses his size well to drive home the danger posed by Tucker, as well as to undermine it with physical comedy. Music plays a key role, too: “Baby Shark” has never been more anxiety-inducing, and it’s truly something to witness a man wearing just a Speedo and wide open robe dancing as if possessed to Stevie Wright’s “Evie (Part One)“. Courtney throws himself into every scene with a gusto that makes Tucker worthy of a place amongst the pantheon of memorable movie villains.

The biggest drag is the movie’s insistence on its personal drama. It needs something to keep us invested in Zephyr’s story and steer clear from torture-porn. But the push and pull between Zephyr and Moses is so drawn out that it feels like the screenplay is stretching to hit the ninety minute mark. Their relationship is used to present the idea that humans aren’t meant to be alone, but that’s so overdone as to elicite eye-rolls instead of agreement. The film would benefit from tightening up its focus, maybe playing up Tucker’s eco-terrorist leanings. As it is, delightful scenes of an unhinged madman are broken up by interactions that will put you to sleep, refusing to let the story build any sort of momentum. And much like many of the shark species featured, the movie’s failure to sustain that forward motion is certain death, especially in a genre predicated around constant thrills.