Maybe it’s a bad sign when you can predict the exact moment a title card is going to drop. So is the case with Dangerous Animals, a new thriller-horror hybrid from the talented Australian director Sean Byrne. The Aussie first caught the attention of global genre fans with his clever teen horror film The Loved Ones on the festival circuit back in 2009; one hoped he’d live up to its promise and become one of our next B-movie greats. Yet even with a steady hand at the helm, his new film plays surprisingly generic. Frankly, watching it, I began to wonder if I was starting to age into my parents, looking down at these kinds of films and no longer entertained by just hitting the beats of a violent serial-killer movie.
Dangerous Animals doesn’t have a bad set-up––a Peeping Tom riff with a serial killer who likes to videotape his victims being eaten by sharks––but seems to struggle coming up with enough fun scenarios from which to expand its concept. The serial killer in question is Tucker (Jai Courtney), who’s introduced as a shark cage diving guide on the Gold Coast who quickly turns on the respective British and Canadian tourists he’s supposed to show a good time in bloody fashion, itself inspiring the predictable title-card drop. We then come to Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a Point Break-quoting hippie who’s obsessed with surfing and seems to have fled America. While shoplifting from a convenience store, she crosses paths with Moses (Josh Heuston), an eager-to-please real estate agent with whom she has chemistry. Dipping early in the morning after their one-night stand to catch some waves, she soon finds herself captured by Tucker while a confused Moses tries tracking down where she possibly went.
The shark sightings in Dangerous Animals are strategically placed so you don’t get too tired of them, but that doesn’t mean Byrne won’t struggle a bit with wringing suspense. The general malady here is that everyone seems game, but the script won’t give any of them enough to work with. Byrne can competently stage a number of exchanges well enough that you (at times) overlook the eye-rolling dialogue; even the usual 2010s action-movie stiffboard Courtney is pretty energized here. But pay attention to how his general body language is more compelling than either the rote serial-killer characterization (nevertheless free of a traumatic childhood) or the number of wordy monologues he’s given. At the end of the day, he’s just another killer who you’ll be oh-so-shocked to find out likes singing along and dancing to pop music.
Probably the sole thing that will get a rise is a self-mutilation scene involving Harrison, a cheap tactic that makes one start to wish the rest of the movie were so shameless. And another climactic shark chum scene contains a pretty memorable money shot, but everything leading up to the bog-standard crowd-pleasing one-liner and action gesture to get there is so reverse-engineered as to engender suspicions Dangerous Animals is actually some subtle work of post-modernism that you simply didn’t get. I know it’s odd to ding a shark thriller for not being more ambitious, but that’s what happens when it’s also not really entertaining enough.
Dangerous Animals opens in theaters on Friday, June 6.
