Thrash Review – The Damned Shark Movie Sinks Like a Stone on Netflix | Thriller movies

DGiven the huge amount of money Netflix has to play with (last year it spent about $18 billion on content) and the ever-increasing number of subscribers it has to satiate, the streaming device often acts as a home for other people’s unwanted goods, and a digital island of inappropriate games. At one point, the shark thriller Beneath the Storm was ready for a theatrical release by Sony, set for release in 2024. The following year, it was retitled Shiver and is scheduled to debut in August. It cut to the year 2026 and is now known as Thrash, and was unceremoniously uploaded to Netflix instead.

While this may not be the most technically encouraging Wikipedia description for a new film, it’s not always a cause for concern. In 2018, David Ellison found Alex Garland’s frightening sci-fi thriller Annihilation to be “too intellectual”, so he moved it to Netflix in the majority of international territories. Early in Covid, Disney sold the excellent Fear Street trilogy to Netflix. Just last year, Netflix saw its biggest success yet with KPop: Demon Hunters, a film that was originally intended for a Sony release. But Thrash is no exception to the rule; If anything, it’s the very definition of what Al Qaeda usually is: a messily made, choppily edited and completely ineffective parade of bad decisions and dodgy accents. I just hope Netflix gets it for cheap…

One would certainly assume so given how cheap the film itself is. Often times, when Netflix buys an actual studio film, the worst examples will boast a well-lit sheen that separates it from the standard, chicken-for-chicken Netflix originals. But Thrash, which by the way is the worst of the three titles this movie has, feels like it could have been a Sharknado Week original movie for SyFy, and is much smaller than we’ve come to expect from a one-off theatrical.

It’s a film that has a distracting sense of inauthenticity from the start, a film directed by a Norwegian and set in the United States but shot in Australia with a mostly Australian cast except for a British hero playing an American. It’s from writer-director Tommy Wirkola, whose work is often known for its silly midnight movie potential. He made the Nazi zombie horror film Dead Snow and its sequel as well as the Santa action comedy Violent Night and the self-explanatory Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. The elevator pitch here is what if it were sharks but it’s also a disaster thriller, as a hurricane destroys a town while also pushing a group of bull sharks into the streets and homes of those unlucky enough to stay there.

It’s very reminiscent of Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, which wove the same premise but using a crocodile, which itself was highly reminiscent of Burning Bright, which used a tiger. It’s by far the least effective of the three, and not just because sharks have become overused with B-movie villains lately (last year we had Bikini Shark, Lone Star Shark, Beast of War, Into the Deep, and the surprisingly sharp Dangerous Animals among many others) but mostly because Wirkola doesn’t feel like the right director for the job. His films are largely satirical, prioritizing big laughs over big scares, and without any real experience in the art of suspense or any real seriousness, he feels as adrift as his actors. We have to be on the edge of our seat, but every set piece has to be static, the choreography is always a little off, and the editing never works as tightly as it should (for a director who also frequently relishes in gonzo gore, Wirkola’s shark attacks lack anything truly bad enough to elicit a reaction other than constant booing).

Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor, whose latest Netflix thriller “Fair Play” was unfairly underrated, is stuck with a character so comically neglected that it’s hard to spend much time worrying about what happens to her. She is a pregnant woman who managed to avoid all warnings to leave the city until she was left alone in her car when the flooding started, about to give birth. On the other side of town, three “American” kids, played by distinctly Australian actors, must outrun circling sharks after their cruel adoptive parents are chewed to bits. Meanwhile, Djimon Hounsou, an actor who often deserves better than his low-key genre, gets the parts of a tired shark exposition as a marine biologist trying to save his niece.

Instead of a group approach that allows various forms of tension to build and add to our overall feeling of unease, it just removes any claustrophobia we might have felt had we stuck to one of the stories, an approach that helped Aja make Crawl a much more rewarding experience. With so many sharks being seen in passing throughout most of the film, the traditional sinister sight of a fin above the water quickly loses its power, allowing the sharks to become as boring as humans. Perhaps Thrash’s best use is to help treat space phobias, proving that they’re not really that scary after all.