Bad
Summary
Despite Jai Courtney chewing the scenery, Dangerous Animals is a generic, tedious slog with mostly wooden characters and no thrills whatsoever.
Plot: A serial killer (Jai Courtney) who kidnaps tourists and feeds them to sharks meets his match when he snatches a surfer drifter (Hassie Harrison).
Review: The trailer to this movie looked awesome. A serial killer? Sharks? A face off adrift at sea? Sign me up!
Sadly, the trailer is the best part of this movie, making it seem like more is going on here than it actually is. Jai Courtney does his damndest to inject some life into the film, giving a wild-eyed, sometimes over-the-top performance. However, the script is not written in that way. He’s supposed to be menacing and unsettling, and he comes across as almost cartoonish at times. I think even he recognized that there isn’t much going on here and tries to elevate it through his performance, even if his character isn’t doing anything.
Unfortunately, nothing is happening. This movie is 98 minutes and is the longest 98-minute movie I’ve ever seen. After setting up Courtney’s character, Tucker, as a serial killer, the film turns to Harrison’s Zephyr, a so-called free-spirited drifter who surfs. Besides shoplifting, there isn’t much anti-authoritarianism going on here. She has a one-night stand, disappears, and gets kidnapped. Courtney holds her and kills another woman in front of her. Then…nothing. Multiple escape attempts, usually successful, as Harrison’s character seems to evade or surprise Tucker easily. Tucker drags Zephyr back to his boat, while the dude she had the one-night stand with looks for her. For a serial killer, Tucker only kills two people in the flick. He talks about sharks a lot, and yeah…that’s about it.
The cinematography was okay, but I disliked the method that Tucker used to kill his victims. He would put them in a harness and drop their bottom half into the water. What would happen is a lot of moving, screaming, and thrashing, but that’s it. You don’t see the actual carnage going on below the water, and it’s not very exciting. The CGI at the end of the movie was very poor and looked like a video game to me. The score was non-existent.
As for the characters, except Jai Courtney, they were mostly wooden. I immediately disliked Hassie Harrison’s Zephyr, as she struck me as a poser trying to be alternative and cool, but it seemed false to me. She did do one badass thing to get out of a pair of handcuffs, but otherwise, it’s the standard run, scream, and fight back. Josh Heuston plays Moses, the love-struck guy she has a one-night stand with. He walks around with a perpetual anxious look on his face as if he realized he left the oven on; as a rescuer, he’s a great real-estate agent. He gets captured immediately, and Zephyr has to rescue him. Because this is the 2020s, and men suck.
Also, big plot hole. In the movie, it’s established that sharks are drawn to blood – hence Tucker consistently drops chum into the water to attract them. That’s how sharks operate. However, when Zephyr, bleeding heavily, jumps into the water, the sharks…don’t care. She has magic blood, don’t you know?
Dangerous Animals has nothing for me to recommend to you. If you want to see Jai Courtney desperately try to save a movie by being weird and wide-eyed, go ahead and waste almost 100 minutes. If you want something better, though, walk away. There’s nothing to see here.