\u201cThrash\u201d 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 \u201cCategory 6\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s Dakota (Whitney Peak), a young woman who became agoraphobic after her mother died. There\u2019s also Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant meat plant employee who was ordered to work in a hurricane because something-something-something capitalism sucks. There\u2019s also Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen) and Will (Dante Ubaldi), three foster siblings whose \u201cparents\u201d refuse to leave town because they\u2019re cartoonishly evil. And just for variety, there\u2019s also Dale (Djimon Hounsou), Dakota\u2019s uncle, who is coincidentally a shark expert, and who travels into the hurricane on purpose just to save his niece.<\/p>\n\n\n
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There are two movies fighting for dominance in \u201cThrash\u201d and both refuse to back down. Lisa\u2019s car gets swept away by a tidal wave and crashes into a tree outside Dakota\u2019s house, forcing Dakota to conquer her fears and venture outside to save this stranger from killer sharks \u2014 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\u2019ve got dynamite. Like you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cThrash\u201d are connected by killer sharks. That there\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Normally, if logic had anything to do with it, that would mean \u201cThrash\u201d was a bad movie. But logic has no place in these soggy halls. \u201cThrash\u201d may be arbitrary but it\u2019s too energetic to be bad. The cast is talented enough to make us care about these people \u2014 at least, to the point where we don\u2019t want them dead \u2014 and Wirkola\u2019s snappy direction makes their plight palpable. There\u2019s a scene in this movie where Lisa is about to give birth on a bed that\u2019s floating so high in a house that the ceiling is about to crush her, while Vanessa Carlton\u2019s \u201cA Thousand Miles\u201d plays on her cell phone, and she played that on purpose. If you can\u2019t get invested in that, not only do I not have a bridge to sell you, but I\u2019m pretty sure I couldn\u2019t convince you to open a savings account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ever since \u201cJaws\u201d came out, Hollywood has been convinced that sharks are the perfect boogeyman. There aren\u2019t a lot of natural predators that humans are scared of, and even though you\u2019re more likely to get killed by a hippopotamus than a shark \u2014 a fact that \u201cThrash,\u201d to its credit, is actually aware of \u2014 scary shark movies usually seem to work. \u201cThrash\u201d isn\u2019t 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 \u201cBait 3D,\u201d about sharks in a supermarket.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The point is, you can get away with a lot in the killer shark subgenre, and Wirkola practically gets away with murder. \u201cThrash\u201d is a Netflix exclusive and for whatever it\u2019s worth, Netflix is probably where it belongs. It\u2019s too expensive for a cheap straight-to-video B-movie but not nearly ambitious enough to demand a theatrical release. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s just wacky and weird enough to keep the folks at home from looking down at their phones. It\u2019s not a great movie but it\u2019s a heck of a lot more exciting than today\u2019s Wordle, even if the answer to today\u2019s Worldle is \u201cS-H-A-R-K.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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