Movie Review: Sharks aren't the scariest thing in the sea-bound, super thriller ‘Dangerous Animals'
As if a movie about sharks wasn't scary enough, the filmmakers behind 'Dangerous Animals' have upped the screams by adding what every thriller needs — a serial killer.
While that may sound like very dangerous moviemaking, the result is actually taut and well crafted, a worthy birthday present to 'Jaws,'
celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer.
'Dangerous Animals' stars
Jai Courtney
as an Australian boat captain who likes feeding his female customers to sharks and videotaping it, while also offering little brainy speeches about the nature of makos, mosquitos or sailfish while toying with his prey.
He meets what seems like his match in Hassie Harrison's Zephyr, an American antisocial surf queen who lives in a van and refuses to be tied down. 'There was nothing for me on land,' she says. She's kind of a handful for any serial killer, For instance, she can pick locks with the underwire from a bikini top.
Nick Lepard's screenplay is muscular and satisfying, with nods to 'Jaws,' of course, but also to 'Point Break,' 'Hannibal' and even the song 'Baby Shark.' He says he was inspired to write 'Dangerous Animals' by seeing a surfboard bag and imagining it carrying a body, which says something about how Lepard's mind works, though we're not judging.
Director Sean Byrnes has a super ability to build dread and his scenes are crisp without being exploitative. The movie was shot on Queensland's Gold Coast, but may take a bite out of the region's shark cage diving fleets. I'm looking twice even before taking showers now.
Zephyr and the serial killer play an engaging game of chess for most of the movie, if by chess is meant she's fighting to stay alive by wriggling out of handcuffs and running or swimming away and he's determined for her to be shark food.
'Oh, you're a fighter. I love fighters. It makes for a better show,' he says, biting into the scenery almost as viciously as the sharks chomp on chum.
He also does that thing that all serial killers do — saying he and his victim are similar. 'You're hard as nails. Like me. You and me, we're sharks,' he tells her. She tells him to stop talking so much and calls him ocean scum.
The music department has a fun wink with the soundtrack. One scene uses Steve Wright's 'Evie (Part One)' — in which the singer begs his love to let her hair hang down — as the serial killer makes mementos out of his victims' hair. Another moment, astonishingly, plays Etta James' 'At Last,' the ultimate wedding song, just as the bad guy finally captures his quarry inches from rescue.
The setting of a boat in the middle of the Coral Sea unlocks a delicious new home for terror. Sealable hatches and no one for miles means screaming is no good. And the serial killer has weaponized Vegemite.
One thing Zephyr has up her sleeve is a boy, smitten after a meet-cute in which she tries to shoplift ice cream. He's played by the hunky Josh Heuston and they're perfect for each other but she resists until she's snatched by our nasty boat captain. But even though she blew him off, her boy is suspicious about her disappearance and is on the hunt.
'Dangerous Animals,' thankfully, doesn't try to be more than it is, although the quite beautiful images of sharks sliding through the ocean show, naturally, that we are the species that inspired the title. After all, sharks don't see a surfboard bag and wonder if they can put a body in it.
'Dangerous Animals,' an IFC Films release in theaters Friday, is rated R for 'strong, bloody violent content, grisly images, sexuality, language and brief drug use.' Running time: 98 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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Talk about a perfect storm. On Wednesday, Giancarlo Guerrero's much-fêted debut as principal conductor and artistic director of the Grant Park Music Festival was dampened by relentless rain. Audiences scrunched under the Jay Pritzker Pavilion fringe, only to play musical chairs dodging the structure's many (and ever-changing) leaky spots. When they weren't doing that, seat shuffles and squabbles competed with the evening's violin concerto. But if Guerrero appeared unflappable onstage, it's because he's been there before. He made his sophomore appearance with the orchestra in 2014 under nearly identical circumstances, down to the solo string showcase and contemporary American opener. Despite the lousy weather, that appearance impressed festival musicians enough to fast-track Guerrero to the top of their director wishlist a decade later. While last week's storm never erupted into thunder, musical lightning struck twice here with yet another exuberant, water-resistant stand by Guerrero on Wednesday, followed by a masterful account of Mahler's Symphony No. 1 on Friday. Wednesday's concert included two harbor works: 'An American Port of Call,' by Virginia-based composer Adolphus Hailstork, and Leonard Bernstein's 'On the Waterfront' suite. Conducting with his pointer fingers rather than a baton, and sporting a new goatee, Guerrero led a sparky, whistle-clean run of Hailstork's eight-minute curtain raiser. But when the music dissipated into quietude — recalling a boat drifting far off from shore, surrounded only by blue horizon — Guerrero guided the music with expansive ease. Bernstein's 'Waterfront' benefited from the same balance of gusto and intuitive pacing. Patrick Walle's horn solo up top sounded suspended in time, before an increasingly feral orchestra jerked us back to street level. Amid the ferocity, the Grant Parkers always sounded whetted and clean, moving through the works' shifting meters with fearsome precision. In the final windup to the end, electric energy gave way to ringing, Mussorgskyan grandeur. Between the Hailstork and Bernstein, Jeremy Black returned to the festival as both concertmaster and featured soloist, offering up the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Even the brunt of the evening's downpour couldn't wash away the strong impression left by this filigree, soulful performance. Black's sound in the opening theme and balladic second movement was sugared but never treacly. Meanwhile, the Allegro molto vivace coasted along serenely, Black's bel canto phrasing and pristine intonation never betraying its finger-flying briskness. Promisingly, Guerrero's orchestral accompaniment was every bit as tasteful. Negotiating solo string balance in the park is always just that — a negotiation — but Guerrero hit the sweet spot of clarity and restraint. The orchestra was able to be a bit more gutsy under Friday's soloist, Pacho Flores. The Venezuelan trumpeter has a sparkling sound, which he dispatched with doting attention to phrase and line in Arturo Márquez's lively, if unseasonal, 'Concierto de Otoño' ('Autumn Concerto'). The work was specifically composed for Flores in 2018, taking unabashed advantage of not just the trumpeter's lyricism but his gatling-gun articulation, unflappable stamina and chameleon flexibility. (He traded four different horns across the 20-minute piece: C and D trumpets in the outer movements, then a flugelhorn and soprano cornet in the middle.) Flores also knows how to work a crowd. Rather than shooting to the stratosphere in his third-movement cadenza, he crawled to the bottom of his range — an amusing subversion of trumpet tropes. He then turned his bell directly at Guerrero and playfully pppththhed at him through his horn, prompting a teasing 'what gives?' shrug from the conductor. That said, it's hard to endorse Márquez's concerto beyond a mere virtuoso vehicle. The orchestral backing is often trite, cycling through the same progressions for what feels like minutes at a time. If the concerto's many flavors of theme-and-variation were engrossing at all, it was entirely thanks to Friday's soloist and orchestra, both playing with tempera-rich color and joie d'vivre. For pops-adjacent music under a more skillful hand, look to Flores himself. He opened and closed his appearance with two self-penned numbers: 'Morocota' (named for a $20 Venezuelan coin) and 'Lábios Vermelhos' ('Red Lips'). Originally recording both with guitar accompaniment for a 2017 Deutsche Grammophon release, Flores sang through his horn with a suave melodiousness that would have done the Rat Pack proud, with just a shimmer of vibrato where it counted. His lush orchestral arrangements would have been right at home in that milieu, too. At one point in 'Lábios Vermelhos,' section trumpets got in on the fun, with a sneering little interjection. Yet another short, Latin-inspired curtain raiser opened the concert: 'Baião n' Blues,' by Chicago composer Clarice Assad. A staple of the Carlos Kalmar years, Assad's inclusion in Guerrero's opening week bodes well for the new festival chief's attention to local composers. Ultimately, though, this performance had some of the same early-season jitters as last week's opener, with a scraggly opening and subdivision disagreement among the violins. 'Baião n' Blues' already isn't Assad's most compellingly structured piece, but a more honed performance might have made a better case. While Mahler sought to depict the world's natural beauty and bizarre juxtapositions in his music, he perhaps didn't anticipate contending with throbbing helicopters, the squeal of a coach's whistle, and hot rods sputtering down Lake Shore Drive on Friday. The Grant Park corps rose above the usual downtown backing track with a fresh, focused Mahler 1. Guerrero cued the unearthly, whistling first bars with an ambiguous gesture that invited the orchestra to melt in freely. Offstage trumpets were piped through the crown of the pavilion stage, sounding mysteriously heaven-sent. When the theme arrived in the cellos, Guerrero maintained their levity and grace throughout the movement — and, in fact, throughout much of the piece, bringing an aerodynamic lightness even to the symphony's final cadence. Because Grant Park 'does things a little differently,' per Guerrero, Friday's performance reinserted Mahler's discarded 'Blumine' movement. Through a complex change of hands, the only surviving manuscript copy of 'Blumine' ended up in in New Haven, Connecticut, where it was rediscovered as part of the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s. If 'Blumine' is heard at all, it's usually as a standalone piece, for good reason: It's arresting but nearly always out-of-place amid the lustiness of the rest of the symphony. Friday's performance gave the same impression — gauzy and subtle, but stopping short of the richness and emotional abandon that would make a better case for its inclusion. Elsewhere, other idiosyncratic touches intrigued and often convinced: more perky staccatos by oboist Alex Liedtke, orchestral accents like bitter twists of a knife in the funeral march, and a slower reading of the klezmer-band interludes. In all, it endorsed Guerrero's warhorse chops as enthusiastically as his new-music acumen. Rain or shine, Grant Park is looking like a fair place to be under his baton.
