Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry we’re headed back to the land down under for another 3D feature!
We’ve seen so many movies in this series where the plot boils down to either “let’s redo Jaws” or “what if there was a shark?” You’ll understand my delight, then, when the next entry in Twenty 20-Sharks actually features something resembling a premise. Bait, like Shark Night before it, comes saddled with a chintzy 3D gimmick. But unlike Shark Night, Bait actually manages to succeed in its meager mission by creating a handful of unique setpieces within its own framework.
Bait (2012) is another shark attack movie from Australia1. In this case, it comes from Kimble Rendall, a one-time music video director who (like many before him) made the jump to feature directing. In fact, Bait was originally co-written and produced by fellow Aussie video director Russell Mulcahy, who had intended to direct it himself before he got wrapped up in MTV’s reboot of Teen Wolf2.
The premise feels like a vintage disaster movie. You get a bunch of characters trapped in one location—in this instance, a tsunami hits the Australian coast and traps a dozen people inside an underground grocery store3—throw in a handful of unique complications, and find a way to save the day. Simple. Oh, and the complication? You guessed it: Sharks in the water!
Our two main characters are Josh (Xavier Samuel) and his ex-fiancee Tina (Sharni Vinson). A year prior, in the film’s opening scene, Josh sat helpless as he watched Tina’s brother get chomped in half by a great white shark. Now, Josh works at a grocery store where Tina happens to wander in with her new beau Steven (Yuwu Qi). At the same time, burglars Doyle (Julian McMahon) and Kirby (Dan Wyllie) prepare to rob the store, while teenage shoplifter Jaimie (Phoebe Tonkin) is coincidentally apprehended by her police officer dad Todd (Martin Sacks).
Okay, so there are quite a few coincidences at play here. I’m willing to overlook that because it’s not like a dozen people need a reason to be at the grocery store, but this way there’s a little more at stake. (Congratulations, Joe, you’ve just described the concept of a story.) So, at the moment the burglars get into a standoff with Todd, the tsunami hits and traps everyone inside with two massive great white sharks. This leads to a handful of little dramatic runners where characters who know each other fret over each others’ safety, and the cop keeps eyeing the burglar and expecting him to continue being a piece of shit.
Most of these side stories don’t really matter, but the one the film deems most important is between a young couple trapped in the parking deck. Their car is miraculously airtight, and the sunroof just above the water line, which allows them to watch as the sharks swim to and fro. They also bicker like young idiots do, and frankly I couldn’t have cared less whether they survived or not. What matters is the film dispatches the girl’s pet pomeranian as shark bait, only for it to magically appear in the third act completely unharmed.
And while it may seem like I’m being pretty flippant about the whole enterprise, what’s most surprising is how well-staged everything about the film is. Also, I’m just plain entertained by the way the movie uses its setting to its advantage. Some real care and craft went into the primary set, a flooded supermarket where everyone’s forced to huddle atop the store shelves. And they get some unique mileage out of that setting. At one point, they realize that not only is the water level rising, but the store’s exposed electrical wiring is dangling from the ceiling. Someone has to go into the flooded stock room and turn off the main breaker. Everyone discusses how to solve this problem, knowing there’s also a shark lurking about, and then the film makes a cut so deeply hilarious that I have to show it to you:
The plan, as I gather it, is to cut up a bunch of trashed shopping carts and jury-rig a DIVING CAGE SUIT(!) for Steven to wear while he dives for the submerged breaker box. If your brain works anything like mine does, you’re probably thinking “this guy is going to fry himself to death the moment he hops in the water”. Friends, no word of a lie, this was the single most hilarious moment in the entire film for me, because I was confident beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was going to happen. It’s too perfect.
Which, of course, means that’s not what happens to Steven at all.
Steven’s fate turns out rather anticlimactically, given the ridiculous suit he’s wearing. But that’s a minor quibble. What’s more important to me is that it’s a pretty novel solution to a crazy problem. An anti-shark diving suit made from cut-up shopping carts is legitimately something I’ve never seen before. Points for creativity, if nothing else.
And while I can’t fully critique the movie on its use of 3D, you can see the intent behind some of the choices. We get a couple of kills photographed from straight up above so the shark jumps out of the water at the camera. There’s also a good bit o CG blood and guts flying out at the camera, too. Pretty basic 3D trickery, and at this point I’m kinda wishing I’d covered Jaws 3D for this series, because I didn’t really expect there to be this many 3D shark movies in the world.
Bait is a film of modest pleasures, but given the litany of crap we’ve seen thus far in this series, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and call it one of the better shark attack movies I’ve reviewed thus far. The cast is game or everything the movie throws at them; the production design is pretty spectacular given the budget and the scale of the thing. And, once again, I have to give it up for shopping cart diving suit man. Ya don’t see one of those every day.
FINAL RATING
3.5 stars (out of 5). S’surprisingly good. It’s on Tubi. Check it out.
NEXT TIME: The Shallows (2016)
- See also: The Reef
. ↩︎ - Mulcahy, for his part, is a music video and genre cinema legend. In the same year he directed the Australian Jaws wannabe Razorback, as well as most of Duran Duran’s era-defining music videos. He also did Highlander, as well as all the music videos associated with that. I could go on…
↩︎ - I’m sure these actually exist, but it’s pretty transparently just an excuse to get people into a location that can be flooded. ↩︎
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