Review: The Reef

Damian Walshe-Howling, his best mate Gyton Grantley, his ex- girlfriend (and Grantley’s sister) Zoe Naylor, and Grantley’s girlfriend Adrienne Pickering are setting out to explore the Great Barrier Reef. With deckhand Kieran Darcy-Smith also on board, much snorkelling and such ensues. For a while. The boat hits some coral and ends up capsized and beginning to sink. Darcy-Smith (an experienced fisherman) wants to stay by the boat and hope for the best, not liking Walshe-Howling’s alternative of swimming to what looks like it might be an island that might only be a few km’s away. Grantley and Pickering aren’t strong swimmers, either. And then there’s the possibility of nasty creatures of the deep looking for their ‘noon feeding’ to quote a certain cinematic shark expert I trust I don’t need to identify. After a bit of debate, Darcy-Smith still stubbornly refuses to leave, but the other three decide that swimming is their best option and they head out. Naturally a shark turns up and the terror begins.

“Black Water”, the previous ‘when animals attack’ film from director/co-writer Andrew Traucki was an ingenious, extremely tense Aussie genre movie. This 2010 film co-written by James M. Vernon tries to do for sharks what “Black Water” did for crocs. Or more precisely, it’s “Open Water” with more characters. The end result is nowhere near as effective as either previous “Water” film. It’s very, very well-shot (especially underwater) by Daniel Ardilley, and has its moments of tension, but not nearly as many as you’d like.

Both this film and “Black Water” blend their scenes with human characters with separately shot footage of the beasties in question. But I don’t think the result is as seamless here as it was in “Black Water” and it’s the main problem. I never quite got invested in it, despite a wonderfully claustrophobic capsizing scene. Bravo on that one, Mr. Traucki.

Another problem would be that this really does feel like something made for TV, despite the cinematography (the scenery does a lot of the work, let’s get real here). The cast is definitely TV: Damian Walshe-Howling is a veteran of TV, Gyton Grantley is practically the most ubiquitous Aussie TV movie/miniseries actor going around. Zoe Naylor, meanwhile, is mostly known for being an all-purpose TV host, more than a real actress. She does have charisma, though. Adrienne Pickering, I must admit, is the one person in the cast I’ve not seen before (Kieran Darcy-Smith is a familiar face from TV at least, as well as a filmmaker). Even the material isn’t exclusively cinematic, to be honest.

I will say, however, that these characters are at least relatively earthy and somewhere around the 30 years of age mark, instead of the usual twenty-ish characters we get in horror movies. They aren’t, however, terribly interesting. We get barely any background on them before the fit hits the shans. For pacing purposes this seems like a good thing, but the fit doesn’t hit the shans all that quickly. So it’s a missed opportunity there.

Three out of the four main actors are pretty good, especially when acting terrified (The best performance is from the guy who stays with the boat, Kieran Darcy-Smith). Certainly the acting is of a higher standard than another water-themed flick of recent years with Aussie actors, “Sanctum”. Walshe-Howling and Grantley are the weakest of the bunch, though the former is OK in a stoic kind of way. Grantley is an actor I’ve never liked. Often cast as crims and thugs, he seems constantly stoned and having to suppress a bout of the giggles in every role I’ve seen him in. Here he never manages to believably convey terror because he looks seriously bugged out even before trouble strikes. If he wasn’t completely baked on set, I’d be seriously surprised. He’s just so goofy and seemingly spaced-out. His eventual blubbering sounded comical to me and took me further out of the film.

The other problem I had with this film is that I’ve simply seen it too many times. After four “Jaws” films, eleventy billion cheap imitators, “Black Water” and “Open Water”, this film offers nothing different, and certainly isn’t as effectively made as those films. Some of the tension and terror still works, but not enough. There’s a reasonably ballsy ending, however, but even it’s a lesser ending than the ending to “Open Water”. Sorry, but this one just didn’t do it for me.

Rating: C+