Jaws dropping: Aussie shark thriller hooks us with scary bites, eye-rolling theatrics
“Dangerous Animals” — 2.5 stars
Sean Byrne’s snarky, sharky Australian thriller “Dangerous Animals” poses no threat to the titleholder of the greatest aquatic-vertebrate-serial-killer movie ever made.
Fifty years ago this month, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” opened in theaters and seismically shifted Hollywood from its collective desire to make the great American movie to a collective desire to manufacture the great American $100-million box office hit, all while inspiring the formation of the killer-shark subgenre.
Meanwhile, the unapologetically lurid B-movie “Dangerous Animals” (the titular characters turn out to be the humans), thrills and chills us with sharply cut scenes of immersive suspense and wincing violence, accompanied by scarifying sound effects, Michael Yezerski’s bludgeoning score, plus Shelley Farthing-Dawe’s radiant visuals and classy camera compositions.
But the dumbness is in the details when screenwriter Nick Lepard sacrifices “Jaws”-level realism by succumbing to B-movie contrivances, too many repetitious escape attempts, and capping his story with a patronizing, insipid final scene that could cause dangerous levels of viewer eye-rolling.
“Dangerous Animals” stars Jennifer Lawrence-look-alike Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, one tough lone surfer whose hard-knock life raised in foster homes has turned her into a solitary, emotionally guarded, independent woman living in a van down by the river, or more accurately, by the beach.
She gets caught shoplifting by Moses (Josh Heuston), a young real estate broker resembling a rejected contender on “The Bachelorette.” He persuades her to jump-start his car, using her van’s battery. Later, he persuades her to jump-start him.
Moses turns out to be one of those movie characters who apparently has no job, no family, no pals or any responsibilities. So, he can devote all his time to searching for Zephyr, who mysteriously vanishes after they share an impassioned montage of intertwined body parts.
She’s been kidnapped by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a burly Aussie boat captain who could pass as a sadistic Mr. Hyde version of Quint, Robert Shaw’s shark-obsessed fisherman in “Jaws.”
For some backstory, “Dangerous Animals” begins with Tucker using winning humor to help a young couple, Greg and Heather (Liam Greinke and Ella Newton), take his popular “swimming with the sharks” tour by climbing into a steel cage that he plops into shark-infested waters.
The couple enjoys an exhilarating experience, but one that gets cut short — literally. Tucker slashes Greg’s throat, then slyly says to a screaming Heather, “Welcome aboard!”
Later, the abducted Zephyr awakens, handcuffed to a bed inside a sickly green cell next to a frightened Heather, chained to another bed inside Tucker’s fishing boat on its way to open waters. Why?
Tucker quickly reveals he’s one sick guppy, a loony tuna who carps about the importance of sharks in the ecosystem while building a creepy library of VHS snuff films.
“Dangerous Animals” clocks in at 97 minutes. Yet, its dramatic lags and an overload of triumphs, followed by inevitable setbacks, make it feel longer, despite committed, exhaustive performances by Harrison and Courtney, throwing their bodies and thespian souls into survival action overdrive.
Byrne, director of the twisted prom tale “The Loved Ones,” delivers the bloodthirsty goodies here with unflinching, disturbing scenes of carnage on a nautical “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” scale.
In one scene, a character rams a hard plastic shaft into another character’s neck. The wound doesn’t bleed much and doesn’t appear to even slow the victim down. Byrne used a similar contrivance in his trippy tale of demonic possession, “The Devil’s Candy,” where a character takes two bullets, then inexplicably exhibits the energetic physicality of Spider-Man.
Why compromise the film’s intense, terrifying realism by employing such theatrical artifice?
Maybe Byrne figured he had bigger fish to fry.
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Starring: Jai Courtney, Hassie Harrison, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton
Directed by: Sean Byrne
Other: An IFC/Shudder release. Rated R for language, drug use, grisly images, sexual situations, violence. 97 minutes.