Review of Crawl (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Wife asked me two questions afterwards over the phone: “Does she save the dad?” and “Does she actually trap the alligator in the shower?” I have seen this film for the express purpose of being able to answer these questions for you, dear reader. The trailer does in fact make it seem like there are a finite number of alligators, maybe four or five, and that one of the Big Showdowns will be the way in which Haley is able to successfully trick an alligator to follow her into a shower stall, but shockingly, there isn’t really a decisive showdown in the film. The gators end up being sort of secondary to the storm in a way that is both disappointing and gratifying, because it means that basically the film which is billed as a monster flick is actually more of an escape the house flick, which has a different set of rules. The gator she blinds about ten minutes into her entrance into the basement never comes up again. Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think of any gator who appears in more than a single shot in the film. I would be more upset about this misrepresentation if I had had any expectations of the quality of this movie in the first place. To be honest, I know the score when I’m the only **** in the movie theater not seeing The Lion King or The Art of Self-Defense.

The trailer to this movie is barely longer than the movie itself and shows you a shot from just about every scene but the last one. There are some scenes in the movie that seem like they were devised for the sole purpose of being included in the sizzle reel, cf. the six seconds when Haley has a gun in her possession in order to shoot the crocodile that has attacked her for taking the gun in the first place. For a movie that’s called “crawl,” there isn’t really that much crawling, either the swim-style or the baby-style. The basement fills up too quickly for much of that signature crawling you see in the trailer. The ending is mercifully abrupt, as if the film anticipates the audience’s rising impatience with the premise. The lack of talk about flood insurance and water damage is a little curious, sounds like a nightmare for their future finances, but I suppose Dave really didn’t have a lot of marketable skills beyond coaching his daughter’s swimming apparently, so maybe that financial point was moot already.

You should know better, but I’m not gonna judge.

Slate’s Keith Phipps’s line of how this film is a “throwback for a simpler time” got stuck in my head a few weeks ago.