An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from this movie but, since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, I always had a weak spot for Bridget Fonda and it had been years since I saw one of her movies. It’s such a shame that she would retire only a few years after making this movie at not even 40 years old. On the other hand, if she could only get cast in such lame movies, maybe retiring was indeed the best option after all. Of course, I shouldn’t expect something award worthy since it was dealing with some gigantic crocodile but I’m afraid it was still really weak. Basically, they took the ‘Jaws’ concept and replaced the sea with some lake and replaced the shark with some crocodile so the end-result felt derivative. The only big difference was that they tried to turn it also into some comedy somehow so there was some constant banter between all the characters. Unfortunately, this approach turned out to be more pathetic than actually entertaining after all. Of course, since the material was really preposterous (something pointed out many times by the characters themselves), they could choose indeed to do something meta and hilarious but, as displayed by this movie, it is actually really tricky to achieve something satisfying (and it was obviously not the case here). The other issue with this approach was that it drastically lowered the stakes as a result. Indeed, the awesome feeling of impending dread in ‘Jaws’ was here almost completely gone which is not what you want when watching a movie dealing with some huge lethal animal. The fact that the crocodile looked really lame didn’t really help. 25 years after ‘Jaws’, it was apparently still tricky to deliver something convincing in this area. Even though the animatronic was delivered by Stan Winston, probably one of the best guys in special effects back then, it still looked rather pathetic. I know that many prefer practical effects but, after watching for years some stellar CGI work in various blockbusters, it is rather hard to take seriously older movies with some rather silly looking puppet which was probably super difficult to create. By the way, the CGI didn’t grow old well either. Coming back on the actors involved (Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, Brendan Gleeson), they wrestled more with the lame dialogues and jokes than with the actual crocodile. Anyway, to conclude, it was a rather lame B horror movie and I don’t think it is really worth a look, except maybe if you really love the genre.