Here’s the elevator pitch: a home invasion thriller, but with alligators. If you think that sounds entertaining, you’ll have some fun with Crawl. However, Crawl is ultimately another example of gimmick-premise driven genre movies that fall flat (see MA for a recent example – and the majority of Blumhouse’s output). The issue is simple: an idea isn’t enough; you have to get to that idea and then extend it in interesting ways.
The setup is the most obvious issue with Crawl. Gators invading a house is a cool conceit but getting to that point is difficult. It’s a pretty ridiculous idea and the film spends its opening act creating a stack of contrivances in order to get to the central premise. We are introduced to a hugely uncompelling central character who is part of a college swim team (who are, of course, called the Gators) but she is in danger of dropping off of the team because her splits aren’t good enough; and this links back to repressed trauma with her father who used to train her (pushing the stick mentality, never the carrot); and then there’s a hurricane which wasn’t supposed to hit an area but did hit the area; and then her dad isn’t answering the phone – which she pretends is fine because of repression but her manipulative sister convinces her that she should go find him; and then she drives into the centre of a hurricane to see if she can find her dad – checking two houses and rescuing a dog on the way. All of this is how they justify being attacked by alligators in a house and it’s utterly ridiculous and chronically uncompelling. None of this is helped by the limpness of the script. Credit where credit is due, when the action comes, there are imaginative and enjoyable circumstances that the script sets up; however, almost every line of dialogue is terrible.
Crawl spends a long time adding character stakes, emotional circumstances and drama into its narrative. And this never works. The dialogue is all expository all the time: characters explain things to each other that they already know and just clunkily reminisce so that the audience is aware of things. You are just consistently being told things about the characters personality traits that are never evidenced through their actions and just seemed tacked on. The film conflates backstory with personality. These characters have a lot of backstory, and you hear about it all the time; however, they merely function as blank slates that give voice to a venn diagram of intersecting character backgrounds. Negative circumstances, past trauma and the like are just shoved onto the characters and nothing sticks. There’s one scene where a group of looters get eviscerated by alligators and in that one scene, through their actions alone, the looters display more personality than the central cast.
This soulless and functional filmmaking is also evidenced by the film’s structure. In many ways, the film feels like a response to a creative writing assignment based on the concept of telegraphing and foreshadowing. So many things happen in that opening act that scream out ‘THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER’ that it becomes exhausting. I’m all for a Chekhov’s gun but I draw the line at: Chekhov’s swimming-ambitions; Checkhov’s screwdriver; Chekhov’s random-cop-who-is-given-a-name-and-a-backstory-for-no-reason-other-than-to-indicate-HE-WILL-SHOW-UP-AGAIN; Chekhov’s divorce-related-trauma; Chekhov’s pipes… The list goes on. Telegraphing is important for narrative cohesion but it only works if it serves another purpose. Earlier this year, we had the fantastic Us, in which so much of what happens in the back half of the film was cleverly set up in the front half, but in that film this telegraphing was so fluid: things clicked into place afterwards and felt natural at the time. Unless you are building specific dramatic tension (or dramatic irony), telegraphed moments should be something you realise when the resulting action happens, not before.
This all being said, the actual core of this film is compelling – that being the alligator action. It’s just sad that so much time is spent skirting around this and adding pointless contrivance. There are a number of creative and satisfying set-pieces and the film is undeniably intense and exciting. There’s some good gore and the film finds varied ways to entertain you with a pretty basic idea. The film is at its best when it feels like a museum exhibition entitled: things going wrong. The best scenes are populated with repeated mishaps and unfortunate circumstances that manage to surprise and entertain the viewer. One action usually leads to an unexpected reaction and a colossal mistake or oversight – and scenes are frequently this loop repeated. When it’s working, it provides a base-level thrill but it’s competent and entertaining. However, the things going wrong exhibition is situated next to the contrivance exhibition, and the film keeps accidentally straying into this latter location. The plethora of plot contrivances already gets in the way but the action itself is often plagued by these issues. Tension is also assuaged by the sense of characters having plot armour. It’s a small cast of characters and there’s not much premise to go round; after a point, it’s just a collection of alligator based set-pieces aimed against the same couple of people. And you know they’re going to be fine because there needs to be more movie. Also, the protagonist gets her limbs chomped on by alligators pretty frequently and shows no adverse reactions to this – she still manages to secure personal best swim times. Things like this diminish the film’s sole appeal: tense alligator action.
Crawl is an entertaining film. However, though I was often having fun with it I was quite frequently having fun at its expense. It’s certainly not good but, actually, it isn’t bad either. The action at its heart is very well done but is too often deviated from. Like with most flawed films, the issue is fundamentally a tonal one. Sam Raimi is a credited producer on the film and I was left wishing it felt more like a Sam Raimi film. Crawl is dumb and it needs to wallow in dumbness; it needs to be campy and comedic. The final credits gives us a juxtaposing song choice that is funny but that just serves to point out that a campy tone works and should have been applied earlier. Crawl is functional and forgettable; with a better managed tone, it could have been a cult hit.
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