{"id":12127,"date":"2019-07-12T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T15:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=12127"},"modified":"2019-07-12T14:57:33","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T21:57:33","slug":"review-crawl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-crawl\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: Alligator Adventure Crawl<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll say one thing for <\/span>Crawl<\/i><\/b>, the new gator caper clawing its way into theaters this weekend: It\u2019s rather snappily paced. Clocking in at an easy, breezy 87 minutes, director Alexandre Aja\u2019s film wastes absolutely zero time setting its scaly predators on its unsuspecting victims, who are trapped in a creepy crawl space under their home. And because co-writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen (<\/span>The Ward<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>The Inhabitants<\/span><\/i>) surmised that viewers might require a bit more peril from a summer popcorn flick, they\u2019ve also added in a Category 5 hurricane into the equation. <\/span>Twister<\/span><\/i>, meet <\/span>Jaws<\/span><\/i>, and add a sprinkling of slasher iconography (here, the crawl space substitutes for the basement, since the setting is Florida, but c\u2019mon, white people \u2014 when will you learn to stop walking down those stairs armed with only a flashlight?).<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, despite this unique hybrid summer-movie plot pedigree, and despite being prominently plugged as a Sam Raimi production, <\/span>Crawl<\/span><\/i> is somehow a bit lacking in the personality department. Part of the problem is that British actress Kaya Scodelario (primarily known for her work in the <\/span>Maze Runner<\/span><\/i> film series, as well as TV shows like <\/span>Skins<\/span><\/i>) is given so little to work with in her role as Haley, a focused, overachieving college student on the swim team at the University of Florida (go Gators!), who drives down to her childhood home to make sure her father (Barry Pepper) \u2014 who recently went through a divorce and isn\u2019t answering her calls \u2014 is safe as the storm sets in. Scodelario is game and gives it her all, but she\u2019s essentially the only character we spend any prolonged time with in this film, as when she arrives at the house, she finds her dad unconscious in the crawl space, with ominous injuries to his shoulder and leg.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As she attempts to drag dear ol\u2019 dad out of the crawl space \u2014 where he had been working on a plumbing repair \u2014 so they can seek help, she immediately comes face to face with a big ol\u2019 gator, and they\u2019re forced to seek refuge behind some pipes where the creatures can\u2019t fit. The water level keeps rising as the hurricane grows closer, and their options for escaping seem to be dwindling: There\u2019s furniture sitting on the would-be escape hatch, and they can\u2019t go through the drainage pipes because that\u2019s where the alligators (yep, they soon discover there\u2019s more than one) keep getting in from. Pretty much anyone who could have come to their rescue meets a grisly end, and here the filmmakers have some fun dreaming up some inventive action sequences. Watching a petty and completely unsuspecting teenage looter get snapped up while grabbing a few hot dogs (and one last Twinkie!) from the nearly submerged convenience store across the street? Perversely satisfying.<\/span><\/p>\n

Crawl<\/span><\/i>\u2019s at its B-movie best when it attempts to insert some grim humor into the proceedings, but unfortunately it mostly eschews comedy in favor of half-baked father-daughter drama (yep, you guessed it, Haley\u2019s dad used to be her rather demanding swim coach, and yep, they\u2019re both quite stubborn and hard-headed, as outlined in an incredibly expository phone call between Haley and her older sister early on in the film). There\u2019s something tonally bland about the entire thing: While the action sequences are compelling and the film more than delivers on its simple premise (killer alligators, y\u2019all), the end result just isn\u2019t particularly memorable or compelling \u2014 the filmic equivalent of a cheap souvenir that says \u201cMy parents went to Coral Lake, and all I got was this T-shirt.\u201d There are probably better ways to beat the heat. \"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Grade: C+<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 27 min.; rated R for bloody creature violence, and brief language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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I\u2019ll say one thing for Crawl, the new gator caper clawing its way into theaters this weekend: It\u2019s rather snappily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":12128,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}