By Marie Straub
We open on a Mesolithic era dig site. It’s dead silent (haha), with almost no movement – unless you count the lizards… and the solo fisherman, Matt Brody (Richard Dreyfuss). Film buffs will notice that this is the guy who survived
Jaws. He’s singing “Show me the way to go home” and when he drops his beer bottle into the lake, seemingly causing a rift and opening a chasm, not only does he get sucked into a resulting whirlpool, but a school of piranha emerge, hungry and ready to give him directions to his maker. The stage is set, the piranhas are out – who will they eat next?
Barely five minutes into this film I wrote down the following note (yes, I take notes): “Like a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video… with fish”. It was one of those moments as a reviewer for which you can later pat yourself on the back, marveling at your astute observation. However, the word “astute” should not really feature in a review of this film. In this case, seconds after Dreyfuss had become fish food we cut to a very different part of the lake surrounded by booming music and bouncy babes in bikinis. It’s Spring Break – which means time to party, near water, wearing minimal clothing. Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) is the town sheriff, tasked with keeping the raging young people from getting too out of hand. She also has a son, Jake Forester (Steven R McQueen) – he’s mostly a good guy, although he has a hard time trying to watch porn with his mom always coming into the room unannounced. He’s agreed to stay home and look after his two younger siblings while mom keeps law and order. Or perhaps he’s just saying that he will. After all, he got an irresistible offer from a guy he met just that day…
That guy is Derrick Jones (Jerry O’Connell). He wants to pay Jake to show him all the good spots, “the G-spots” around the lake – you guessed it, Jones makes porn. Lured by the promise of gorgeous women and spurred on by wanting to seem like less of a loser to the girl he really wants but thinks is out of his league, Kelly (Jessica Szohr), Jake takes the job, paying his siblings to stay at home and out of trouble. But in movies with flesh-eating fish, there’s no staying out of trouble. Just as Jake takes to the waters, Kelly in tow, with Jones and his porn-star crew, the little ones decide to head out on the lake with a canoe. So while Jake’s getting to watch some underwater naked ballet (it’s as ridiculous as it sounds), the kids get themselves stranded on an island in the lake when they don’t do a good job of tying up that canoe.
In the interim, their mother has not only discovered what is left of Richard Dreyfuss, she’s even managed to catch herself a piranha. She then attempts to get all the drunken semi-clad young people off the lake – but they are too busy enjoying wet t-shirt competitions to hear sense. Really, she needs a lesson from SAPS on how to put the fear of God into people. But what she didn’t manage, the fishes do, as a piranha feeding frenzy ensues. Cue more blood and raw meat than you would find in an abattoir. Not even Ving Rhames (who plays the sheriff’s trusty side-kick), armed with guns and propellers, is able to hold back those ugly little buggers. Ultimately, when Julie discovers that Jake is on-board a sinking boat with his younger siblings, she’ll be helped by a geeky but surprisingly capable seismic geologist who came to check out that chasm Dreyfuss’s bottle created. I believe his name was Novak (Adam Scott), but names really don’t matter in this film… boobs do.
From the high-art meets low that is the naked underwater performance to opera music, this film really leaves nothing to the imagination. That, in and of itself, I could be alright with, if it wasn’t all so one-sided. With all the booty being paraded around, the least they could have done would’ve been to give the gore-loving ladies of the world some eye-candy to appreciate. Not even one male piece of fish food was even remotely worth writing home about. In addition to this, as someone with a natural fear of things under the water that I cannot see, they really didn’t manage to capture that sense of a fear for what may be lurking in the depths. Sure, there were revelations about this particular breed of Piranha being 2-million-years old and liable to hunt in packs in an organised, methodical way, but you can’t just throw it into the plot – it’s in HOW you film it. Outside of an underwater pursuit of Jake’s little sister’s bleeding foot, this film was more obsessed with boobs than fear and more obsessed with gore than fright moments. The 3D is also more gimmick than anything else, more to enhance the ladies than to make the fish scary.
There’s a formula. The bikinis are all too small for the girls wearing them and the boobs are of the fake kind that never move… ever… even during underwater ballet. Formulaic is taken to new levels when people start dying. If you are a drunken debaucherous teenager, you will get munched. If you ogle women and treat them as sex objects, you will get munched. If you are a woman who chooses to be a sex object, you will get munched. If you try to save yourself with no regards for others, once again, you will get munched. If you’re sweet and innocent, you have a shot at not getting munched.
So now that you know what the film holds for the actors, what does it hold for you? You’ll get as much 3D butt as you can handle, and more breasts than they have at any one Teasers branch at any given time. Gore is king, with some fantastic carcass deliciousness on display – in addition to fish-munching deaths, people will get chopped in half (and conveniently stripped topless) by cables, decapitated by crashing boats and even have themselves scalped (never get your hair caught in a propeller).
Not even worth it for the opportunity to see Jerry O’Connell (half-munched at this point) screaming “They took my penis”, unless you’re still a teenage boy at heart, this film is a waste of time. I was expecting some gore, some fun, and a little ridiculousness, all of which would have combined to have me leave the cinema thinking “so long and thanks for all the fish”. What I got was soft porn, lots of mince meat, and a plot line that had me repeatedly saying out loud “You’ve got to be kidding me”. So instead, I left saying “so long and thank God I don’t have to look at any more fake breasts”. Could’ve just slapped a steak on my head, whipped my top off and looked into the mirror for an hour and a half… although to be fair, the result would have been less plastic.
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