Crawl review: alligators attack in an absurdly fun Friday night creature feature

Dir: Alexandre Aja. Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Ross Anderson, Morfydd Clark. 15 cert, 87 mins

Even before the levees break during a savage Florida hurricane in Crawl, the gators are out to lunch, gnashing their way around a grimy basement where a father and daughter find themselves imprisoned. “We are going to beat these pea-brained lizard s___s!”, bellows Barry Pepper’s injured dad to Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a college swimming champ who has come to the most dangerous corner of the floodplain to save him.

These two set about pitting human brains against reptile ones to save their own bacon – and if a truly excellent version of Crawl is even to be imagined, it would probably flex this difference in native intelligence and satisfy immensely as a battle of wits.

Battle of what, you say? Crawl, directed by the French horror specialist Alexandre Aja (Haute tension, Piranha 3D) is no such version of itself, mounted though it may be with a showman’s attention-grabbing virtuosity from first to last. While the storm – Category 5 – wreaks its impressive computerised deluge outside, the CG alligators come off swimmingly, too.

They bulge and thrash, more numerous than we first realise, and swish around at any vibrations in the water, with some near-miss chomps and then some that find their meat. Before long Pepper and Scodelario, trying to tag-team their way through this crisis, are both applying tourniquets in agony and plotting their next hobbled move.

It goes without saying that Haley’s freestyle abilities will come in handy when there’s distance to be covered at pace. Outside, none of the other saps who try to outswim these apex predators stands a chance. There’s a daft section where she spies three unsuspecting kids across the street in the process of looting a gas station. When she tries to flash her torch for help, the gators – doing #MAGA’s work unbidden, it seems – close in at that exact moment for a lavish feeding frenzy.

Aja, to whose surname it’s hard not to affix an imaginary exclamation mark, knows how to goose you with a well-timed sting and exploit screen space to build suspense. He gets mainly effective, slightly shaky work from both his leads. He also can’t help but imitate James Cameron to within an inch of his life. There’s a last-ditch CPR scene straight out of The Abyss, not to mention an alligators’ egg lair into which Haley slithers like Sigourney Weaver finding the alien motherlode.

It’s utterly absurd, especially this bit, and a different category of fun. Besides, the film lifts when we’re not having to go through the motions of a boring father-daughter relationship that’s pure processed cheese. Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

You wonder how many further limbs Pepper may well have jettisoned, the next time he points his daughter across infested floodwater, tosses off a quick pep talk and yells “SWIM!!”. Crawl isn’t Jaws, any day of the week, but it’s crunchy Friday-night nonsense that knows what it’s doing.

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