I have an admitted soft spot for genre films that revolve around a high concept that they execute with a minimum of fuss and extraneous nonsense, particularly when they clock in at somewhere around a tight ninety minutes. In recent years, I’ve seen several examples, perhaps most notably Fede Alvarez’ Don’t Breathe and Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows. Crawl isn’t as good as either of those, but it’s cut from the same cloth and it’s a fast, intense ride that delivers a compelling good time and gets you in and out in a solid eighty-seven minutes.
The high concept for Crawl is pretty nasty. A young woman attempts to rescue her injured father during a hurricane and finds herself trapped along with him in a basement by a hungry alligator. I mean, even that is too wordy: pretty girl fights alligator in hurricane, right? That’s basically what we have here. And the movie just delivers exactly that and, while there’s a bit of family drama to be hashed over during quiet moments, the movie knows what it’s up to and it barely pauses to let the audience catch their breath or pick up on plot holes. Kaya Scodelario is a compelling lead; there’s a sharp kind of edginess to her even before the alligator shows up and she’s nothing if not type A, a swimmer who can’t stand to even come in second as we see in the opening scene. There are flaws, however. I’ve never been a fan of Barry Pepper and he doesn’t do anything to change my mind here with his performance as the father; it’s a labored performance, not particularly good. The weather effects are pretty good and pretty terrifying, as in an astounding sequence when a levee breaks, inundating the movie with a whole new level of floodwaters, but the alligator effects are a bit sketchier. Aja shows the alligator too much; when it enters the story, it’s with a full-fledged villain shot that shows the beastie from tip of the tail to tip of the nose. These things are always scarier when you don’t see as much, especially when the effects are as iffy as these are. Sometimes they look really good; sometimes, especially as more and more alligators show up, they look pretty weightless. I get that this was a cheap movie, but even just having one real alligator on hand for a handful of shots would have helped this movie immensely in terms of it being genuinely scary. Still, this is being pretty nitpicky for the movie as it is and as it is, it’s good and a lot of tense creature-based fun. A movie’s got to know its limitations; Crawl mostly does and it’s a brisk, high-energy good time at the movies. 3 stars.
tl;dr – fast-paced, high-energy creature feature knows it’s a high-concept thriller & it delivers a brisk good time; special effects sometimes show their cheapness, but oh well. 3 stars.