Review: Shark Thriller CHUM Doesn’t Have The Chops
If you’re a reader of Movies In Focus, then you’ll know that a good shark thriller is very popular around these parts. In the least year we’ve had some exceptionally good ones – Kiah Roache-Turner’s World War II themed Beast Of War and Renny Harlin’s disaster film inspired Deep Water. Sadly, the third time isn’t a charm as Jonathan Zuck’s Chum fails to deliver the goods. You might say that this shark flick lacks… bite.
Starring Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond, Sarah Siadat and Jim Klock, Chum sees the participants of a destination wedding venture out into the high seas for a day excursion. Things take a nasty turn when the captain falls overboard and gets eaten by a shark – but things go from bad to worse when they’re seemingly rescued by another vessel. Unfortunately, their apparent rescuer (Klock) has a Captain Ahab complex with the aforementioned shark – and he wants to use his new motley crew as bait to lure and kill it.
Chum has a pretty interesting premise, but it’s very much failed by the execution. The plotting is too contrived, the characters are too thin and a most of the performances are a little off. Look, I’m not expecting high art, but I do want a little more than what’s on offer with Chum (even the music is clunky). Throw in some heavy handed climate change messaging and you’ve got the misjudged combo of having a killer shark exploitation flick with a badly framed environmental message. Imagine if Steven Spielberg decided to use Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue in Jaws as a segue-way into a no-nukes speech.
On the plus-side, the shark action in Chum is pretty well handled – and it’s hard to tell where the stock footage ends and the digital tomfoolery begins. It all looked pretty good for a low budget schlocker – and it was better done than a lot of movies with much larger budgets to play with. If only the rest of the film was able to match those standards and we just might have had something worth watching. A shame.
Sadly, Chum is a film which doesn’t hold together (even for a mindless B-movie). It’s not something that you’d want to sit down and watch, but it might eventually find an audience on streaming if someone is looking for a cheap horror film to watch as the clock strikes midnight on a Friday night.
