Crawl

Rating: 4.25/5

Does Crawl have the potential to do for Florida what Jaws did for the ocean? Probably not, but is it a good time anyways? Absolutely.

College student and competitive swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) is planning on staying away from her hometown in Florida, as there is a Category 5 hurricane beginning to take over. Her plans however, get a wrench thrown in them when her sister calls to ask if she's heard from their father. When Haley responds no, she starts to question his safety from the storm and makes the decision to head towards the storm to check on her dad before the weather gets too bad.

As Haley gets to her town border, she sees the evacuation is already underway. The only way she can get to her father is to defy the police officers' orders and charge passed them so she can get to her family home. Once there, her dad is nowhere to be found, and she begins to worry something more ominous than a storm is lurking about.

Crawl is a good ol' fashioned monster movie and I love it. The runtime for the film is quite short, being just under an hour and a half from beginning to end, but for this type of film that's a positive, not a negative. Had this movie been any longer, the numerous alligator attacks would likely have been overdrawn and gratuitous. I have seen films that do just that, and by the end of it you are more than ready for it to be over. The writers for Crawl were very smart in having the inevitable blood and gore last only as long as needed, and making sure the novelty the film was trying to sell, killer gators, didn't overstay its welcome. By doing so, everything in Crawl appears to happen in rapid succession, leaving very little down time to let your nerves or adrenaline begin to normalize.

When I first watched Jaws many years ago, I remember that for me, the most frightening scenes weren't where you actually saw the shark, but when you were witnessing scenes from its point of view under the waves. The same can be said for the most fear inducing sequences in Crawl, though in a very different setting. Instead of underwater shots looking at aquatic plants and the legs of swimmers, you are seeing cars and gas pumps submerged by hurricane flooding. What might make this even more unsettling than a look beneath the ocean, is the lack of clarity to the water in Crawl. As a viewer in the audience, you struggle to see exactly what the gators and main characters are swimming through, but you know, as by what was previously stated in the film, that the scaly swamp predators have impeccable hearing when it comes to finding their prey beneath the surface. You can't help but feel your heart rate begin to increase as you strain your eyes to see what lies within the murky water.

What so many movies like this struggle to do, is effortlessly weave in any backstory for the characters. Many times, the relationships presented are strained for one reason or another, meaning that there is almost a guarantee that at some point a heart-to-heart conversation of reconciliation is going to take place. Without that, it seems the filmmakers worry the audience won't be able to form any connection to the characters, and therefore they feel the need to bring an emotional background to them, no matter how forced it may appear. Crawl does have some remnants of this concept, but it doesn't feel quite as fabricated or artificial as other movies' attempts have been. I did find myself suppressing the occasional eye roll when any moment of sentimentality presented itself, but I definitely understand why Crawl felt the need to include them. In order to ensure their film would be many steps above a SyFy channel original movie, they needed to give their characters a certain amount of depth in order to add a level of realism to them. For the most part, this tactic succeeded, but it wasn't able to fully escape the trap of having the added emotion come off as being a bit out of place.

When I first saw the trailer for Crawl, I can't say I was overly eager to see it, but I figured I'd give it a shot, expecting it to just be a silly but overall entertaining film. I was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and not because I found it silly. It was exciting, genuinely jumpy at times, and an all around solid creature feature.