Crawl (2019) Review

This film recently made it's way to Sky and I saw it was only 80 minutes long so I decided to quickly watch the film Crawl and here is my review for it. The premise of the film sees a young girl have to go back to her home during a tornado to find her Father when Aligators attack causing her to use her skills to attempt to survive.

Main Character

Kaya Scodelario plays the lead in the film and she is fine, she plays the strong female lead well and you can't help but want to root for her to succeed against the Gators so she does her role fine. I mean there is no depth to her character at all and I get a film like this isn't meant to be an interesting character study but it could have done with something to make the character better and give you an even bigger reason to care and support her. 

Supporting Characters

Barry Pepper plays her father in the film and again I thought he did a fine job, they have pretty good chemistry here and he has the funniest most cheesy parts of the film down. Though there are certain aspects of the character explained but never really explored and you wonder why exactly it was here but when it is here you have to do something with it. Their really aren't anybody else of note here, just some people kind of set up as sacrificial lambs for the gators but you don't care because the characters don't care all too much. The Gators as a threat are fine, but Jaws they are not, they are sometimes terrifying and sometimes idiots plus the film really can't make its mind up how many gators there actually are as it changes throughout the film.

Story

The story again isn't what is important here, I mean it does a successful job in making you care about the lead character so in there it works and deserves credit. But as mentioned it introduces certain story aspects that feel forced and don't play out at all and the film doesn't really do much for a while in the film with the characters just staying in a basement. Also this film ends really abruptly, I wasn't asking for much more but maybe 5 minutes more to wrap up some of these things but we didn't get it. 

Script

The script has the cheesy one liners you would expect here and a bit of the drama works. But there is too much wasted dialogue about certain things that don't matter to the situation they are in, they think it's fleshing out the characters but it isn't doing anything at least not for me. 

Style

One thing this film deserves credit for is that it's style is very suspensful, you are on edge like the characters and you feel like you are in the basement too. Also, this film knows what it is and is like I said only 80 minutes long, it doesn't try and force a 2 hour runtime because it knows it shouldn't. But as I said there are some boring parts of the film for me and the characters interactions feel like they could have just been cut out or made better. Plus the CGI for the gators is poor, I get they didn't have a huge budget but they just look really fake. 

Overall

Overall, this is exactly what you would expect. An over the top silly monster film that knows what it is, if you have 80 minutes and want something dumb and loud to have on the background then why not just don't expect the next Jaws here.

Rating - 5/10