I’m not a particularly religious person, but I think there’s probably a moment when you’re driving a tanker truck filled with blood in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane and the levees break and the town completely floods and a statue impales your tanker truck and releases all the chum into these newly shark-infested waters and a bull shark is about to eat you that you begin to wonder if God is real, and if God has a bad sense of humor.
In a movie, of course, the director is God. They manipulate the events of the story for reasons that hopefully make sense, if only to them. Writer/director Tommy Wirkola is the God of the killer shark movie “Thrash” and he’s a trickster if ever I saw one. There are really bad hurricanes in the world, that much is true, and they seem to be getting worse every year, but that’s where the realism ends. It takes multiple acts of god to make this fish story look even remotely possible. Not “plausible,” that adjective waved “bye-bye” a long time ago. Just possible enough to make a silly movie out of it.
“Thrash” tells the story of Annieville, South Carolina, which is getting hit by a Category 5 hurricane so large that someone suggests they should invent a “Category 6” just to describe it. (Great, now Nigel Tufnel works for the Weather Channel.) Everyone with an ounce of common sense and self-preservation is fleeing the town, or left already, so instead we focus on all those other people.
There’s Dakota (Whitney Peak), a young woman who became agoraphobic after her mother died. There’s also Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant meat plant employee who was ordered to work in a hurricane because something-something-something capitalism sucks. There’s also Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen) and Will (Dante Ubaldi), three foster siblings whose “parents” refuse to leave town because they’re cartoonishly evil. And just for variety, there’s also Dale (Djimon Hounsou), Dakota’s uncle, who is coincidentally a shark expert, and who travels into the hurricane on purpose just to save his niece.
There are two movies fighting for dominance in “Thrash” and both refuse to back down. Lisa’s car gets swept away by a tidal wave and crashes into a tree outside Dakota’s house, forcing Dakota to conquer her fears and venture outside to save this stranger from killer sharks — and of course Lisa immediately goes into labor. Meanwhile, the three kids are trapped on a table in their house, trying to figure out how to survive after the sharks attack their wicked foster parents. Fortunately they’ve got dynamite. Like you do.
You might think, since these two stories are about the responsibilities of parenthood and the relationships between parents and their children, that they would actually intersect at some point. You would be wrong. The plots in “Thrash” are connected by killer sharks. That there’s a theme seems to be a total coincidence. If anything it looks like Wirkola wrote a whole movie about Dakota and Lisa, realized there wasn’t enough material to make it feature-length, then wrote a second short movie and duct taped them together to meet his quota at the last minute.
Normally, if logic had anything to do with it, that would mean “Thrash” was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. “Thrash” may be arbitrary but it’s too energetic to be bad. The cast is talented enough to make us care about these people — at least, to the point where we don’t want them dead — and Wirkola’s snappy direction makes their plight palpable. There’s a scene in this movie where Lisa is about to give birth on a bed that’s floating so high in a house that the ceiling is about to crush her, while Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” plays on her cell phone, and she played that on purpose. If you can’t get invested in that, not only do I not have a bridge to sell you, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t convince you to open a savings account.
Ever since “Jaws” came out, Hollywood has been convinced that sharks are the perfect boogeyman. There aren’t a lot of natural predators that humans are scared of, and even though you’re more likely to get killed by a hippopotamus than a shark — a fact that “Thrash,” to its credit, is actually aware of — scary shark movies usually seem to work. “Thrash” isn’t even the first decent genre flick about getting trapped in a flooded building with man-eaters after a tidal wave. (If you want to see the better version, check out the 2012 thriller “Bait 3D,” about sharks in a supermarket.)
The point is, you can get away with a lot in the killer shark subgenre, and Wirkola practically gets away with murder. “Thrash” is a Netflix exclusive and for whatever it’s worth, Netflix is probably where it belongs. It’s too expensive for a cheap straight-to-video B-movie but not nearly ambitious enough to demand a theatrical release.
It’s just wacky and weird enough to keep the folks at home from looking down at their phones. It’s not a great movie but it’s a heck of a lot more exciting than today’s Wordle, even if the answer to today’s Worldle is “S-H-A-R-K.”
