‘Chum’ Review: Uninspired, Rudimentary, and An Outright Failure
I was mixed on Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals. I didn’t love it as much as my peers, though I did concede Jai Courtney was the best damn thing about it. His villain, Tucker, was so zany and played with such conviction by Courtney that his bouts of monstrousness were that much scarier. Chum, which is, curiously enough, also distributed by Independent Film Company, lifts the broad premise almost wholesale – stranded newlyweds and their friends are rescued by an ostensibly kind fisherman who really intends to use them as the title suggests. Dangerous Animals had Jai Courtney. Jonathan Zuck’s Chum has almost nothing.
Personally, I’d take a dozen Roger Corman shark movies to this chum (slop) any day. Despite a dollop of decent gore and an overqualified Alice Eve, Chum really is a chum bucket, the Weenie Hut Jr. of killer shark flicks. Zuck is a passionate filmmaker, which is excellent to see– and I support the hustle– but Chum scrapes the bottom of the ocean floor, salvaging neither interest nor intrigue.
Tina (Eve) and her new husband, Tom (Eric Michael Cole), are on the fritz. While exposition is doled out at a glacial pace, it largely amounts to incompatible post-nuptial ethics—Tina wants to advance in her law career, though Tom has taken umbrage with her new client, an oil company. Think The Black Demon in how Chum tries (and fails) to cram in an environmental message, reasoning that the killer Maltese shark has been driven north due to rising sea temperatures. It’s window dressing intended to add depth where none is earned.
Their friends (literal chum) subsequently bully the pair into taking a booze cruise, unaware of (and really uninterested in) their forthcoming annulment. The shark, aggressive in the Jaws 4: The Revenge sense, targets their boat, leaving them floundering. Luckily, fisherman Roy (Jim Klock) is around to rescue them.
Roy, while not as explicitly evil as Dangerous Animals’ Tucker, is a violent man, and his ludicrous ploy involves using the castaways as live bait to track down and kill the shark that ate his wife several years before. He knows it’s the same shark because he attached a tracker to it, or something, and he’s allegedly been doing this for years (and proximately close to shore) without the Maltese authorities catching on. That becomes the thrust of Chum. Everyone cries and pleads for their lives as Roy, one by one, locks them in a diving cage as bait.
The antics are uninspired. Only Eve conveys the theatrics of a trained thespian. Everyone else, including Klock, emotes as if they’re still in the audition stage, reading lines absent any context. All at once, characters are simultaneously incredulously calm and unfathomably angry. Tina, while not Eve’s fault, is arbitrarily portrayed as a fighter, the only member of the crew to mouth off and make any effort to save everyone.
The shark attacks—the subgenre’s currency—are most egregious. That’s where the bulk of the VFX come in. The crew merges real footage with generated underwater attacks, and while—yes—the sharks are more convincing than most digital sludge, they only work while still. Chum threatens a constant comparison between real footage and aggressively, insultingly unconvincing effects, and I was nauseated by the tenth time a poorly-generated shark thrashed around and stained the surface of the water crimson.
Sharks, to be fair, are notoriously difficult to animate. Underwater physics, the flexibility of their bodies, wetness, and light refraction render them considerably more challenging than, say, a terrestrial Kaiju running amok. But I’ve accepted that. I love The Shallows, recently tolerated both Thrash and Deep Water, and grew up on a cocktail of Sharktopus and Swamp Sharks. Chum reeks of artifice, trading in a lackluster gore quotient that’s incomprehensible where it matters most.
Chum is so uninspired, so rudimentary, so disengaged and uninterested in anything remotely resembling filmic competence, it’s an outright failure. Sharks deserve better. Audiences do, too.
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Chum
Summary
Chum lacks identity, taste, tension, and really everything that signals a horror movie as a horror movie.
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