Another day, another shark movie. Tommy Wirkola’s Thrash is mercifully leagues ahead of the likes of the Sharknado series in terms of quality, but obviously not even within wading distance of Jaws, still the daddy of all ferocious finny features. It is, however, a solid eighty-odd minutes of well-mounted action with moments of genuine tension, excitement and high stakes.
The town of Annieville on the east coast of the USA is battening down the hatches as it awaits the arrival of a Category 5 hurricane named Henry. Wiser heads are fleeing the town, but as the storm hits, there are still some who haven’t been able to make themselves safe. Dakota (Whitney Peak), frozen with agoraphobia following the recent death of her mother, tries to sit the storm out indoors as her marine biologist uncle Dale (Djimon Hounsou), tracking a great white shark he and his team have tagged, makes his way towards the town to rescue her. Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), heavily pregnant and just dumped by her boyfriend, decides to drive out of town, but has left it too late, and she’s caught in the storm, crashes her car and is trapped inside. Elsewhere, orphans Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen) and Will (Dante Ubaldi) are forced to shelter with their feckless foster parents, Billy (Matt Nable) and Rachel (Amy Mathews). The hurricane destroys the seawall, and the town is flooded. So far so sodden.
But when a tanker truck carrying offal and animal blood (seriously…) bursts open and spews its contents into the water, curious bull sharks are attracted and start prowling the flooded streets and roads of the beleaguered town. And don’t forget that great white shark… Yeah, you can probably write the rest of it yourself…
Despite its shameless abundance of minor disaster movie clichés (pregnant woman, abandoned kids, woman struggling to come to terms with a debilitating personal trauma, etc.), Thrash is far better and more entertaining than it has any right to be. The storm and its devastation are sufficiently spectacular, and the individual characters’ dilemmas, while eye-raisingly familiar at times, deliver a string of nicely directed moments of danger and peril even before the sharks make their presence felt. When the predators do arrive, they make short work of a number of supporting characters unfortunate enough to be out in the open water, and there are a handful of quite graphic sequences of mutilation and plenty of gouting, spurting blood.
Shark movies clearly aren’t going out of fashion any time soon, and while Thrash doesn’t bring anything new to this particular terror table, it’s lively, pacey, utterly undemanding and far more accomplished than it really has any right to be.
THRASH is streaming now on Netflix.
