Piranha 3-D (Review)

Piranha 3-D plays like the recurring dream of a pubescent boy; flashing between violent and sexual excesses with every single shot. At that level it works well enough, and there is a whole lot of dumb fun to be had for about a third of the movie. The rest, however, can enter the territory of depressing and nausea-inducing. There are no characters that even flirt with entrance into a second dimension, yet here we are watching the movie in three, a technology which darkens the picture and slightly hampers some of the visual fun which could be had. Where I land on this film is comparable to my feelings on The Expendables: This could have been a classic piece of trash, but at the end of the day it’s just trash.

The film begins with a not very subtle but clever enough wink-wink to Jaws, as if to acknowledge that the plot (which essentially resembles a clothesline on which to hang the bloody garments) is a rip-off of the Spielberg classic. We open on dear old Richard Dreyfuss fishing all by his lonesome out in the middle of a lake. What song is he singing? “Show Me the Way to Go Home”.





Soon this movie’s Chief Brody incarnate (a sheriff played by Elizabeth Shue) is on the scene, and when they pull Dreyfuss’ bloody remains onto the beach it becomes clear that THIS WAS NO BOATING ACCIDENT! Without blinking an eye Shue wants to close the beaches, but her deputy Ving Rhames says that it will not happen because it’s spring break, which is “a big financial week for our town”. Oh, did I mention this movie rips off Jaws?

Shue has children as well, the eldest played by Steven R. McQueen, whose career is doomed already by name alone. He is supposed to babysit his two younger siblings, but instead is enlisted by Derrick Jones (played by national treasure Jerry O’Connell) to help him scout locations for his latest "Wild Wild Girls” video. This is all neatly laid out so the younger children can be in danger and McQueen can face several moral dilemmas as the film goes on. In fact, the entire plot is written into the first 20 minutes, essentially table setting for a bunch of hot (often topless) college students getting slaughtered.

The entire movie is tasteless and has no morality, but its success depends on the stomachs of the audience. The film works best when it wades in the low-rent Jaws waters, focusing on individual killings that hold some impact. The shark in that film was big and lumbering, which inspires more fear than a bunch of speeding, indecipherable objects that exist to tear people to pieces. When we enter the third act we end up witnessing a violent, unpleasant slaughter of spring breakers that goes on far too long and thinks it’s being thrilling. All it does is test what you can take and when the film starts to meditate on the aftermath it became disturbing. The water is a literal bloodbath, and there are torn, tattered, sometimes conscious bodies coughing up God knows what on the beaches and boats. Ha ha?

Yet there is plenty of cheap entertainment to be had at several points along the road. There are a ton of topless objects, I mean women, and the early piranha killings deliver the goods simply because it isn't as endless and excessive. The cast is actually quite good, and besides the main family and porn directors we have Adam Scott (of the brilliant-but-cancelled Party Down and the brilliant-but-soon-to-be-cancelled Parks and Recreation) playing the modern-day Matt Hooper, Eli “Bear Jew” Roth as the Wet T-shirt contest emcee, and a terrific scene with Christopher Lloyd who studies the specimen.

The film could have improved by giving us reasons to not care who gets torn to shreds by the killer fish. It uses spring break as an excuse, I guess, claiming that since these kids are drinking and shaking their groove things they deserve to be mutilated. Only a couple characters (O’Connell and Roth come to mind) provide targets of hatred, and the rest of the victims come off as innocent bystanders. So when a woman’s hair gets caught in a boat propeller and the skin on her face is pulled off, or when a cord cuts a woman in half, taking her bikini top with her, I’m not enjoying myself. Jaws was able to create a vivid community, making us care about every casualty and making the hunt for the shark all the more urgent. Each and every character in Piranha is thrown away with the care of toilet paper.

Piranha 3-D knows that it's trash, but it isn’t able to take that self-awareness far enough. About a third of it smells of something more memorable, particularly the first scene and anything with Christopher Lloyd. The final shot is also brilliant, but it’s too bad the ads give it away. You can try as hard as you want to manufacture fun out of a movie this violent, but there’s only so much you can shine a turd. Despite my occasional smiles, around the point when a motorboat was running over many helpless, flailing bodies in the water, I too hoped someone would show me the way to go home.

Rating: (out of 4)