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Sunday, July 14, 2019




Apex Predator All Day

"I never thought it'd end like this," Kaya Scodelario tells her father Barry Pepper in Crawl. No doubt. How could she ever think she'd die in a watery basement eaten by alligators during a Category 5 hurricane? That's a very specific way to die but in Alexandre Aja's Crawl, that's exactly the life or death scenario Scodelario and Pepper find themselves in. Crawl is a perfect storm in more ways than one: beyond just the hurricane, which has caused floods and broken levees in South Florida, it's beyond unfortunate Pepper's house is right next to an alligator farm. Going up against one gator would be bad enough but there are multiple gators in Crawl, each hungry for Scodelario and Pepper's limbs - and they definitely get their licks in.

In Crawl, Scoledario plays a swimmer for the University of Georgia, Gainsville swim team. She's estranged from her father but goes looking for him when a hurricane hits and she finds him unconscious and badly wounded in the filthy crawl spaces of his basement. Unfortunately, Pepper's not alone: there are two gators down there too, with more on the way. That's it, that's the movie - Scodelario and Pepper have to somehow survive as the storm gets worse and worse, flooding the town and turning it into a gator party. Within this simple premise, a father and daughter reconnect and go to extremes to survive. They don't necessarily make it out with all of their limbs intact. They also have a dog, a wonderful pup named Sugar that the filmmakers wisely don't use as gator feed. Mostly a two-person and one doggo show, Crawl has a few extra characters who the gators make mincemeat out of. Meanwhile, Scoledario is in nearly every scene and she's a champ whether she has a medal for swimming or not.

Unlike sharks, the basic factoids of which have seeped into the collective unconsciousness ever since Jaws and the annual Shark Weeks and Sharknados, Crawl takes advantage of the fact that most of us don't really know a lot about alligators (I sure don't). Besides the obvious basics like avoiding the jaws, the ins-and-outs of fighting gators are a mystery, as Scoledario finds out when she dodges a gator's snapping mouth but gets whacked in the face with its tail. We wonder whether a gator attacks because its visual acuity is based on movement, like a T-Rex. And we're not exactly sure if a champion swimmer like Scoledario can swim faster than a gator - but it's fun finding out. The gators act like movie monsters when they need to and come out of the water for jump scares, but they also stay in the shadows when necessary to effectively build tension. 

Crawl starts off a bit like a crawl but then ramps up nicely. Pepper and Scoledario both get bitten quite a bit and are badly injured throughout the movie; it's probably not as easy to shake off multiple gator bites as they both make it seem and, in reality, they likely should both have bled out and died from their nasty wounds. There's one moment where a gator clamps onto Scoledario's arm and takes her on a death roll but at that late point in the film, Scoledario has been bitten so many times that she just takes it in stride as she tries to reach a flare to electricute the gator with. 

Overall, considering how Pepper, Scoledario, and the other actors and crew must have spent weeks in a wet, cold, filthy set, everyone comes out of Crawl looking like champs for their total commitment. Especially Scoledario, who holds the movie together with determination and gusto; she even has to swim through rancid water with her eyes wide open which should earn her an award of some sort just for being a great sport. Crawl is as good a father-daughter v alligators movie as you could ask for. And Crawl could even be a segment from Batman V Superman; when Scoledario and Pepper are on top of their house waiting for help, if they'd drawn a giant S shield on the roof, Superman probably would have shown up hovering over them.