{"id":594774,"date":"2026-04-10T12:43:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T12:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594774\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T12:43:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T12:43:11","slug":"shark-disaster-cant-decide-if-its-silly-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/594774\/","title":{"rendered":"Shark disaster can’t decide if it’s silly or not"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s more corny humor than one would expect in the underwhelming shark-hurricane disaster movie Thrash,\u00a0an emotionally constipated eco-thriller that winks at its audience throughout, but whose bloody violence and pandering laugh lines never goes full-tilt\u00a0Sharknado<\/a>. Unlike\u00a0Sharknado\u00a0and its sequels<\/a>,\u00a0Thrash\u00a0presents the main threat to its characters\u2019 safety\u2014a Category 5 hurricane that makes landfall in Annieville, South Carolina\u2014with a mostly straight face. But while Thrash resembles a general-audience survival horror drama, its forgettable protagonists also frequently stop to reassure viewers\u2014mostly through profanity-laced dialogue and occasional bursts of gore\u2014that it\u2019s okay to scoff at whatever they\u2019re looking at.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thrash often looks like writer-director Tommy Wirkola (Violent Night<\/a>, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) couldn\u2019t settle on a tone or just one group of characters to focus on, and instead chose to throw in every half-formed mood and subplot that he could think of. Wirkola and his team\u2019s creative indecision is especially counterintuitive given how much time and expository dialogue they waste hyping up the peril facing Annieville residents like Dakota (Whitney Peak), an agoraphobic teenager living alone in her dead parents\u2019 house. Dakota eventually teams up with fellow survivor Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant woman whose car gets dragged to Dakota\u2019s place by tidal flooding right as her water breaks. Lisa\u2019s the subject of some glancing comedy, though it\u2019s especially hard to know why her \u201cperfectly curated birth playlist\u201d is so funny that it comes up multiple times, as if listening to Vanessa Carlton\u2019s \u201cA Thousand Miles\u201d is somehow the funniest thing you could do in the middle of a crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as if being stranded in the middle of a flood zone wasn\u2019t bad enough, Lisa and Dakota are also surrounded by flesh-eating bull sharks. You might think that outmaneuvering those sharks would take up most of our heroines\u2019 non-pregnancy related focus while they wait for Dakota\u2019s intrepid shark expert uncle Dr. Dale (Djimon Hounsou) to rescue her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for us, the bull sharks are more interested in terrorizing a trio of scrappy orphans\u2014Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen), and Will (Dante Ubaldi)\u2014and their charmless redneck foster parents Billy (Matt Nable) and Rachel (Amy Mathews). This is unfortunate because the kids don\u2019t have personalities, and their guardians mostly cuss at and condescend to them. Will and his siblings only really stand out in a handful of scenes where they have to navigate their foster family\u2019s water-logged home, searching for supplies or an escape route.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those sequences at least provide a welcome break from the unnecessary dialogue exchanges between ostensibly desperate people who either talk so much that they halt the movie\u2019s meager momentum or land too hard on wan one-liners. Sometimes they do both at once, like when Dr. Dale not only explains to his young colleagues why he became a shark expert, but also scolds them for not knowing much about modern Africa: \u201cWe lived in Mozambique, not the fucking Jungle Book.\u201d Head-scratching zingers like that make one long for the comparative restraint and focus of producer Irwin Allen\u2019s epochal disaster movies, like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thrash\u2018s weak stabs at humor wouldn\u2019t be so distracting if they weren\u2019t used to compensate for the blandness of its crowdpleasing moments, like when Dr. Dale exclaims, \u201cHoly fucking shit\u201d after he sees one bull shark jump through the air to take out another bull shark. Hounsou\u2019s line might\u2019ve been more convincing if the sharks in question didn\u2019t look so cheap. Sharksploitation films<\/a> usually don\u2019t need sterling special effects to be good time-wasters, but you know you\u2019re not having a good time when you start wondering why the shark movie\u2019s jokes aren\u2019t landing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dakota and Lisa\u2019s scenes also feel like missed opportunities, since they spend more time circling each other than navigating their perilously inhospitable surroundings. This type of movie usually thrives on circumstantial peril, but Thrash isn\u2019t that conventional or satisfying. There are flashes of a better, or at least less self-conscious, movie whenever the protagonists aren\u2019t spelling out everything that their creators want us to know is on their minds. But even the scenes where characters flee to higher ground feel played out, especially when compared with the too-brief scenes of mindless disaster carnage.<\/p>\n

The makers of Thrash never pick a lane and stick with it, making it hard to know if their ideal viewer is supposed to actually root for Dakota and Lisa, or clap when Billy inevitably (and repeatedly) runs into a bull shark. Either would have been fine, but trying to do both at once deprives this dull genre exercise of a clear sense of purpose. There\u2019s too much and not enough going on in Thrash to make it worth your full attention, though a handful of bull shark-centric scenes might make you wish you were watching a better programmer during Shark Week.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Director: Tommy Wirkola
Writer: Tommy Wirkola
Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Alyla Browne, Djimon Hounsou
Release Date: April 10, 2026 (Netflix)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s more corny humor than one would expect in the underwhelming shark-hurricane disaster movie Thrash,\u00a0an emotionally constipated eco-thriller…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-594774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}