Crawl: Movie Review

Crawl: Movie Review

Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Crocodiles, a cute yapping dog
Director: Alexandre Aja

Sometimes, a film just simply does what it says on the tin.

Such it is with Crawl, an unabashed 87 minute B-movie creature feature that wastes no time simply setting up its premise, and then getting on with it.

Scodelario is a stoic and steely Haley, a swimming champion (fortuitous in later moments) whose fall from grace has coincided with her parents' splitting up. When a massive hurricane hits Florida, where she lives, she races to find her father (Pepper, grizzled and in a thankless role) as the flood waters begin to rise.

But trapped in their old house, the pair soon finds the biggest problem isn't the rising water - more what lies within in the form of gators, ready to snap...

There's very little to say about Crawl, other than it pits Haley, the former Apex predator in the pool, against the real life watery ways of the Florida marshes and flooded levees.

And it's, simply put, fine in places, stretched in others as it revels in its human vs immutable forces of nature edges.

Mixing Jaws and any other creature features is fine, but forcing the audience to believe their characters can display as much strength as they need to when they've been chomped is a bridge too far, and while the film's flaws don't divert they do distract from what's going on.

Keeping the watery shots to a minimum, and using the most of the space afforded to him, Aja mounts a reasonable case for tension, and delivers a few kills that will satiate some of the gorehounds in the audience. But a lack of a fuller cast makes Crawl's weaker moments stand out more as the walls close in.

It helps that Scodelario is watchable enough and has enough grit and compunction to keep the audience along for the ride, even when the script and the silliness starts to wobble.

It's not exactly a croc of a movie, but Crawl is a solid, if unspectacular, creature film that could have been shorter and as a result more taut. As it is, it's fine enough fare, and a weird counterpiece to Blake Lively's The Shallows.