I had to rag on a movie; the fact that any ever get made is a minor miracle, let alone that some are great. But there is almost nothing positive to say about this. Almost nothing. There is a single insane, inspired bit near the end. It’s a four-minute stretch, from the 77 minute mark until around 81 minutes, that makes you wish any of the rest of the movie was anywhere near this cool and fun. I won’t spoil things, but it is incredible. It’s so good it begs the question: can one transcendent moment redeem an almost entirely unredeemable movie? The answer is no, but hot damn does it come close. Also, a character refers to one of their aquatic attackers as, “Some aggro incel shark,” which is pretty funny. So maybe two high points.
[Related Reading: 'Hungry' Movie Review]
Tina (Alice Eve) and Tom (Eric Michael Cole) don’t like each other. It honestly feels like they’ve never met before. That fact, however, doesn’t stop them from having a massive destination wedding in Malta. The next morning they head out on an ill-advised three-hour catamaran tour—movies like this love to put hungover people on boats—with four friends. A few minutes later, their boat is on fire. Fortunately Roy (Jim Klock) is around to rescue them. Oops, he has a mission of his own, a vendetta against the shark that ate his wife five years ago, and he plans to use the survivors as bait to exact his revenge. This is roughly the first 15 or 20 minutes of the movie, though there are three openings—Roy’s disembodied voice over about his wife, a quickie wedding sequence, and then news footage about climate change and sharks moving into waters where they’ve never previously ventured.
That sounds like it could be fun, a kind of Jaws-meets-Dangerous Animals riff. There’s definite potential there. Only there’s no tension or excitement, no thrill, or even forward momentum to speak of. The script from director Jonathan Zuck and co-writer Joe Leone is clunky and leaden, and the deliveries of even the most pedestrian lines are feeble and come across as a read-through or a rehearsal rather than something that should make the final cut. It’s almost like the actors got one pass at each line then they moved on, vowing to fix it in post. The ADR—rerecording lines of dialogue at a studio during post-production—use is all over this movie. It’s a common practice, but here it’s crazy intrusive and obvious. Mouths often don’t match words, and a huge portion of Tom’s lines are delivered from a shot of the back of his head when his mouth is clearly not moving. There’s nothing interesting or compelling, or particularly human, about any of these characters to begin with, and this doesn’t do the film any favors.
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Illogical choices, plot holes, and miscues abound. To the point where it barely feels like anyone is trying. There are frequent references to how far out in the ocean they are, despite the fact that there is usually land visible in the background. Roy has ample opportunities to shoot his shark at close range, and takes none of them. Not to mention, he’s been at this for five years. Basically, he’s the most shit shark hunter in existence. Even in Malta, everyone, including the Coast Guard, is American. There are allusions to class strife, climate change, including a tacked-on diatribe at the end straight out of On Deadly Ground, and other issues, but it has nothing to say about anything.
We could go on, but this seems like a good point to address the great white shark in the room: the shark. The filmmakers have reportedly denied it, but there have been a number of accusations that they used AI for the shark effects. (People have pointed to signs like the near total lack of VFX people credited, and that the company responsible for the effects is deep in the AI business.) Regardless of your feelings on AI, or whether it was actually used, it does not look good. Imagine random nature clips fed through an AI bot and that’s how bad the finished product is. However they got there, the end product is lacking. Yes, this is a low-budget affair and as a result, the creature work is bound to be hit and miss. But you can also look at a project like Hungry, for a film with a comparable budget and scale, but that managed to put in the work and pull off a strong effort in this regard.
[Related Reading: 'Shark Bait' Movie Review]
If you absolutely must watch Chum, and you shouldn’t because it is almost entirely unwatchable, fast forward to the hour-and-17-minute mark, watch for four minutes, then turn it off and pretend the rest of the movie was like that. It’ll save you a lot of time. Like I said, there’s nothing to recommend here.
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