Crawl (2019) - Be quick or be dead - 6/10 (23/07/19)

Alexandre Aja's Crawl certainly is no spectacular movie but it's entertaining and gets to the point.

At the very beginning, I wasn't too sure about that. The viewers get introduced to a young competitive swimmer who has a slightly strained relationship with her sister. She also has taken some distance from her father after her parents' divorce. We are also introduced to a police officer who seems to know her sister and her rather well. None of these plot elements are significantly going to be picked up again and only serve to quickly introduce the charactets and the plot in less than ten minutes.

What follows is a fight for survival as the competitive swimmer tries to save her father from the basement of their family home as a hurricane intensifies and alligators roam the area.

The special effects are surprisingly solid, the pace keeps going until the very last minute and the action scenes are rather realistic. Classifying this movie as a horror film would be inappropriate since there are only very few scary scenes. This is a fast-paced survival action flick.

The movie also made me think about the Sunshine State and why anyone would live there. Florida is regularly hit by natural catastrophes, dangerous animals roam the state, there are numerous serial killer cases, there are thousands of noisy tourists around all year long and the state voted for Donald Trump during the last Presidential election.

To keep it short, Crawl is an entertaining survival action film that grips you while it lasts but ultimately fails to leave a deeper impression. It's a good movie to watch at the cinema on a lazy night.