Review of Crawl (2019) by Theredsky — 14 Jul 2019

Crawl is surprisingly a decent monster movie. Here are the negatives. The visual effects suck. The alligators look like they came out of a Playstation 2 game and it is kinda distracting. Barry Pepper’s acting was really inconsistent.

At the beginning of the film, he wasn’t trying at all and his acting was pretty bad but as the film progressed, it did get better. Towards the end of the film, some of the action scenes start to get repetitive.

The main character will get out of a fight with an alligator into another fight with an alligator. Another issue would be that some of the characters kinda walk off major injuries. One of the characters has a broken leg but seems to walk it off later on.

My main issue is that the characters make some pretty dumb decisions. They are multiple moments where the characters could make an escape but they don’t. One such scene is when one of the characters finds a shovel and instead of using it to knock out a weak wall, they decide to attract the attention of the alligators.

That problem does take away from the experience of the film a little bit. Here are the positives. Kaya Scodelario does a great job as the main character. You feel for her and what she is trying to do, which is save her Dad.

She does a great job at finding different and creative ways to fight off the alligators. The production design for this film is really good. The sets are pretty cool. The basement set makes you feel claustrophobic while the water fills in.

The film knows how to build tension really well. The film always present this sense of danger throughout the entire scene until the last act. The beginning scene with the gators is incredibly tense. They set up the fact that the gator is in the basement and you just have to wait till they reveal it to the characters.

The film is incredibly gory also. You do see people’s bones sticking out of their body and you do see a gator rip a guys head off and it’s incredibly intense to watch. They also make the smart decision to not use music in these tense scenes so that it feels real.

The soundtrack is generic but it does have a couple good scores in there. The cinematography is decent for what the film is going for and the tone and pacing are consistent. Overall, Crawl is a decent monster movie with a good protagonist and some great set design but is held back by dumb decisions and crappy visual effects.

I give Crawl a 5/10.