The people who made The Grey can fuck right off. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. I had seen trailers for The Grey and wasn’t all that happy with the portrayal of wolves as villains, as you could imagine me being sensitive to. I heard multiple reviews where people said, “Wolves aren’t the villains any more than snow is a villain,” and that wolves were just a representation of one facet of the challenges found when stuck in the wilderness. I was okay with that, and since I was working at a movie theater, I popped my head in a few times and only ever saw ridiculous “facts” being tossed around about the predatory habits of wolves, so suffice it to say, The Grey ended up vilifying wolves in the exact way I had imagined. When it comes to animals like wolves or sharks or bears, I get pretty offended when they are treated merely as a mindless killing machine that’s used to drive the plot forward. As you might have read in my review, Jaws is an exception to the rule in that the movie’s not about the monster, but rather the men facing the monster. Whether it have been a shark or a squid or Cthulhu, it didn’t really matter. This isn’t to say that I’m a giant stick in the mud with movies where I automatically get my panties in a bunch when I movie makes a defenseless animal the villain. I can enjoy the campier things like Piranha with its prehistoric fish or Deep Blue Sea with its genetically altered, super-smart sharks. Knowing that Bait involved killer sharks, I had pretty low expectations, and I got pretty much what I expected.
Not entirely sure if the people who did the CGI have ever seen a shark before, because this thing is fat as shit.
Off the coast of Australia, a man is killed by a great white shark despite his best friend Josh’s (Xavier Samuel) best attempts to save him. A year later, Josh now works in a supermarket and is still dealing with the depression of not being able to save his best friend. While on his way in to work one day, Josh notices strange behavior from animals, which serves as a precursor to the earthquake and tsunami that ends up flooding the supermarket. Trapped in the supermarket is your typical hodgepodge of different characters, from Josh’s ex-fiance to a guy who attempted to rob the place to girl and her cop father, and of course the manager of the store who isn’t keen on taking risks. There’s also a few people trapped in the flooded parking garage, and both the parking garage and supermarket have a great white shark swimming around in them! All these characters attempt to get out of where they’re stuck in all manner of escape, but most of them end up being eaten by one of the two sharks. Eventually Josh is able to get to the car of the policeman, get some weapons, and team up with the attempted robber to not only kill the two sharks, but blow a hole in the debris long enough for everyone to escape. Once back on dry land, all these characters realize there probably wouldn’t have been a rescue team ready to save them, as the entire coast has now been destroyed by the tsunami.
Only now am I realizing that the water doesn’t even flood the fucking door in the background, meaning it’s probably only six feet deep. BUT YEAH, WHERE’D THAT SHARK GO IN THIS MASSIVE ABYSS?
The last movie I saw with killer sharks was Shark Night, and that movie was fucking awful. One of the bigger issues I had with that movie was the fact that, for as ridiculous a premise as that film was, they randomly dropped in some facts about sharks to make it seem like the events of that film could actually happen. Rather than embracing the camp of it, Shark Night took itself just a little too seriously. On the other hand, I can really enjoy something like Deep Blue Sea in the ridiculousness of super smart sharks hunting people through a giant underground warehouse, especially with how surprising each death was. Bait ends up falling somewhere in between these two films in the seriousness of its tone. Like Shark Night or like Piranha, Bait was also originally released in 3D, so most of the deaths or action shots are an obvious attempt to utilize the 3D technology. On the other hand, we get scenes involving Josh mourning for his best friend and his ex-fiance, who’s also his dead best friend’s sister, consoling him. I think the only thing that could almost be considered a fact would be Josh seeing how far it was from the shark’s dorsal fin to its tail, and using that information to estimate the size of the whole shark. That’s something people can kind of do with some degree of accuracy? One of the most ridiculous things about this whole movie is that, at least with the supermarket location, all of the characters and an almost 12 foot long shark were trapped, but even though it looked like there was only about a million gallons of water, no deeper than 10 feet, these people kept fucking losing track of the shark. HOW COULD YOU NOT SEE SOMETHING THAT BIG SWIMMING AROUND!? Not just that, but the average cruising speed of a great white shark is around 5-10mph, which is definitely a speed you’d notice from a shark that big. Even though I didn’t really like this movie and I can’t really recommend it to anyone, it’s still better than Shark Night was.
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wow think I will take a pass on this one. My fellow blogger and brother was equally horrified by the depiction of wolves in The Grey.
As much as I hate using the term, this movie “is what it is”. If cheesy vilification of animals is what you want, that’s what you get. Thanks for reading!