Crawl (2019) Review

Director: Alexandre Aja
Writers: Michael Rasmussen, Shawn Rasmussen
Stars: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark
Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/37R5ODl

Synopsis

We see in the opening shots that Haley’s on the University of Florida’s swim team. She doesn’t win the race, but she’s obviously pretty good. She remembers her father telling her not to cry when she lost her first race. Back in those days, he called her “an apex predator.” 

Her sister calls and points out that the middle of a hurricane is about to hit her father’s house. “He might be trying to ride it out,” says the sister. Haley says she’ll drive down and check on him. She drives through the storm. The police have a roadblock, and they aren’t letting anyone in, but Haley drives around and powers through the storm anyway. 

She arrives home and finds the family dog, who leads her to her father, injured in the crawl space under the house. He’s unconscious, but not dead. It looks like something large bit him in the shoulder. We see the storm worsen as she drags him through the muck. She’s almost pulled him out of the crawlspace when a huge dinosaur– I mean alligator– breaks through from somewhere and chases her. How will they get out with that thing blocking the stairway?

Her father, Dave, starts to wake up. He gives the lamest “I don’t need your help” speech ever as he clutches his broken leg and bleeds all over. She crawls around, looking for a way out and she learns that there isn’t one alligator down there, but two. She gets bitten and dragged off, but manages to escape. 

The water in the crawlspace starts getting noticeably deeper. She sees out the vent that there are three people outside; they’re stealing the ATM from a convenience store across the street. Two of the robbers are eaten while Haley yells for help. She doesn’t actually see the third one get eaten, but we do. There are a lot of hungry alligators in this neighborhood. 

At one point, her father explains that there’s another way out of the cellar in the house where she grew up. Like she wouldn’t have known about that. Still, there’s something sitting on top of the trap door, so that doesn’t work out either. 

One of the cops she met earlier at the roadblock comes inside the house. Haley and Dave yell and bang on pipes. He finally hears them down there and radios his partner, who is currently being eaten by a bunch of alligators that seem to act more like rabid piranhas. 

You’d think the alligators would be sated and sleepy after eating two cops and three robbers, but not so much. They have plenty of time to digest their meals as the father and daughter talk about why the parents split up and how Haley needs to be more of a fighter. The alligators didn’t go to sleep during this, but it was probably a challenge for them. 

The father beats on a pipe to attract the alligators while Haley makes a break for the stairs. He manages to cave in the floor and trap and kill one of the gators. 

Haley can’t make it to the stairs, so she tries for the drain pipe, which is most likely the way the alligators got inside in the first place. It leads to a sewer system large enough that she could have had elephants in the cellar if they had wild elephants in Florida. This is, of course, where all the baby alligators and eggs are. As well as at least one of the dead cops. She grabs the cop’s gun, and the alligator bites her arm, but she shoots the crap out of it.  

She swims through another pipe. It’s miraculous how clearly you can see in an underwater sewer pipe during a hurricane. She narrowly avoids getting eaten, but she gets outside. Meanwhile, dad’s drowning in the filled-up crawlspace. She breaks a hole in the kitchen floor in exactly the right place and pulls him out. She then does CPR on him completely improperly. Still, he wakes up.

They go out the front door, and everything is flooded, and there are many  alligators outside, no longer even trying to be stealthy. They decide to try for the robbers’ boat. By walking really slowly and not splashing, they figure they can fool the alligators. Suddenly the rain stops, and the water starts getting really calm. 

Then the levee breaks. Dave tells Haley that she can swim faster than the alligators, which isn’t even close to true in the real world.  She makes it to the boat, the same boat that held the robber who was eaten… on the boat. Those alligators can’t get her on the boat now though for some reason. The flood from the broken levee hits, and they all get sucked right back into the house. 

Now, they both get to play cat and mouse with the alligators throughout the flooding house. She spots one of the policeman’s radios and uses it to call for help. 

Dad loses an arm, but he’s still OK otherwise. Haley hides in the bathroom’s glass-walled shower stall, and the gator can’t get in. She tricks the gator inside, and he can’t break out either. 

Eventually, both of them, and the dog, end up on the roof waiting for rescue. A helicopter appears and they both get away. 

Commentary

I wouldn’t have even gone down into the crawlspace in the first place. I’ve never lived there, but I would expect to see alligators walking up and down the sidewalks in Florida. It’s just what they have there, like tornadoes in Kansas and serial killers in Indiana. In all reality, every alligator I’ve ever seen in person is lazy and sleepy-looking, not insane killing machines like these guys. It’s not like these are trained, mutant, or cybernetic alligators either, they’re just the normal Florida citizens. 

The storm effects are most likely CGI, but they do all look very convincing. The alligators look really good as well. The acting from the two main actors is fine, and everything looks nice, but this story really takes “suspension of disbelief” to a whole new level of ridiculousness. One or two of the action points in this film would be reasonable, but this is just one impossible thing after another. 

It’s fun and looks good, but boy, is it dumb.