Review: Bait

Xavier Samuel plays Josh, a lifesaver who saw his best mate killed by a shark, something he still hasn’t quite recovered from. He even lost girlfriend Sharni Vinson over it. Now Samuel is a shelf stacker at the local supermarket when would-be bank robbers Julian McMahon and Dan Wyllie attempt to rob the joint (Are the “Nip/Tuck” residuals so piss-poor that McMahon has to resort to robbing a piddly supermarket? Really?). Also in the supermarket are young shoplifter Phoebe Tonkin and her cop father Martin Sacks, as well as the recently returning Vinson, who has a new Singaporean boyfriend. Awkward. Oh, and a tsunami hits, putting the supermarket partly underwater. And that’s when the nasty, blood-thirsty sharks turn up! Lincoln Lewis and Paris Hilton-esque Cariba Heine play a young and dumb couple (with an ugly handbag dog to boot) stuck in the supermarket basement car park with a shark of their own to contend with.

 

This is the film that, with a little more competence, “Sharknado” could’ve been. However, this 2012 schlocky shark movie from director (and founding member of genius Aussie pub rock band The Hoodoo Gurus) Kimble Rendall, is still a few whiskers shy of actually being a good film. It has an irresistible premise, a terrific set, and a lot more technical competence than “Sharknado”, but the performances are wildly uneven, and like “Sharknado”, it’s not as much campy fun as you want it to be. It nearly gets there, though and is a billion times better than Rendall’s previous “Scream” rip-off “Cut” and I’m always happy to see Australians making genre pieces, even less than stellar ones. It’s a bit of a shame the film flopped (at least locally, it did fine in China and even Italy), because it’s not a bad film and boasts the schlockiest premise to never grace an Irwin Allen production.

 

It doesn’t start particularly well, though. The set-up is far too elongated for something that, frankly, involves a bunch of ‘types’ rather than characters. Aside from Xavier Samuel (in the film’s best performance) as lifesaver Josh, none of the characters really pop. This isn’t helped by some seriously uneven performances, by actors who should frankly know better. Sharni Vinson, Lincoln Lewis, Cariba Heine, Phoebe Tonkin, Martin Sachs, and especially Julian McMahon, are all veterans of the small screen by now, and in the always frighteningly emaciated Vinson’s case, she has had some exposure in American films too. You may not consider Aussie soaps like “Home and Away”, or kids shows like “H20: Just Add Water” to be great pieces of art, but those sorts of shows do tend to breed the stars of the future (Isla Fisher, Melissa George, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Nicole Kidman, Heath Ledger, and others have all gotten their start on soaps and kids dramas). But on evidence here, a lot of their performances are pretty damn amateurish. Julian McMahon, probably the most senior among them (best known for playing an egotistical plastic surgeon on the popular “Nip/Tuck”) is especially bad.

 

And then there’s the accents. Either some of these ex-pats (particularly McMahon, but also the gorgeous Tonkin) have had a hard time shaking a newfound American twang, or some idiot (possibly the director) has instructed them to adopt an American (or somewhat mixed) accent for overseas marketing purposes...or something, because the accents are truly all over the shop here. Sharni Vinson (who ain’t gonna age well with that tan) and Cariba Heine appear to have a full-on American accents, but it doesn’t seem convincing coming from their mouths, and I could never tell if their characters were meant to be American or not. McMahon, and especially Tonkin, however, were simply drifting in and out of it. If McMahon’s character was meant to be an American, surely his cohort Dan Wyllie would have a Yank accent too, so I think it’s just that Tonkin and McMahon couldn’t shake their Yankee twang. So boasting a cast full of veteran TV stars and ex-pats doesn’t quite reap rewards for Mr. Rendall here. Xavier Samuel (is he obligated to appear in every Aussie film these days?) is perfectly fine in the lead, but the only other ones who were halfway decent were a well-cast but underused Lincoln Lewis (he’s spot-on as a douchebag, perhaps for good reason), a reasonably well-cast Phoebe Tonkin (who at first glance doesn’t seem the rebellious-type, but really isn’t bad), and a slightly too broad Dan Wyllie (who I swear is doing a David Argue impersonation). Wyllie is at times hilarious as the last guy you’d like to be in this situation with. But Martin Sachs playing a cop? Wow, that’s a stretch. Vinson is by far the worst of the actors, like I said her accent might never waver, but it seems forced and her performance is just terrible. And that surprises me a bit, because she’s hardly a novice. Meanwhile, this might be a little too ‘insider’ for some of you, but I was a little disappointed that I never got my mermaid vs. shark showdown. I mean, there’s at least two damn mermaids in the film, and if you’re looking for bait, wouldn’t Tonkin or Heine be your first choices? So disappointed about that.

 

I won’t say that I was terribly enamoured with any of the characters here, but at least they’re a varied lot. There are some strange editing choices, however, or at least some characters have conversations with seemingly the wrong people. Either there is some connective tissue missing via some messy editing or it’s just really bad writing by screenwriters John Kim and the one and only Russell Mulcahy (the underrated and visually-minded director of “Razorback”, “Highlander”, “Ricochet”, and many an 80s music video). Unless I’m mistaken, not all of these characters knew each other (at least not very well) before being thrown into this situation, but at times, the dialogue scenes seem to suggest a familiarity. So perhaps, in order to get the running time down, some relationship building had been snipped.

 

What the film really suffers from, however, is that despite the schlockier than schlock premise, it’s still predictable and clichéd. I also have to take the filmmakers to task for over-populating the film with underwritten ‘types’, too many of whom actually survive. Gory deaths are an important part of these sorts of films, especially if it’s not “Jaws” and you’re not Steven Spielberg. I was shocked at the paltry amount of casualties here.

 

It’s an extremely beautiful-looking film, especially those beach scenes early on. This is a much, much better-looking film than “Sharknado”, which was cheap and murky. Sure, some of the CGI sea creatures weren’t 100% convincing here (the fish and sea snakes are terrible), but at other times, either they used footage of real sharks, or damn...they fooled me. The shark has to be real at least some of the time here, I’m sure of it, and boy is that one scary and nasty shark with cold, black, dead eyes. Rendall seems to have fully embraced the schlock value of 3D, by splattering blood on the camera quite often, so for once I’m almost sad to have seen it in 2D, though it didn’t suffer for being seen in 2D, either. You can tell it’s a 3D film, but not in any annoying or detrimental way. Excellent bit where a guy gets eaten in half, by the way. Yummy. The set, as I’ve said, is terrific, and I bet they had a fun time conceptualising it. The supermarket motif is priceless, just like the shopping mall full of zombies (both alive and undead) in “Dawn of the Dead”. Clever stuff, and it’s precisely why I find going to the Sydney Aquarium deeply uncomfortable. If there’s a McDonald’s near the Aquarium, by the way...take a very close look at the menu before ordering!

 

This isn’t a great film, and it’s just a tad underwhelming as schlock too, but there’s no doubt Rendall and co are no hacks. Is it a good film? That’s an irrelevant question under the circumstances. Is it good schlock? No, but it’s not bad schlock either, and it’s the kind of film I want to encourage Aussie filmmakers to continue making. Most of these films tend to be awful, so whilst hardly “Jaws”, when one of these films doesn’t suck, one should embrace it to an extent. You could do a lot worse than this film, even if it hasn’t been as culturally embraced as “Sharknado”. I think it at least deserved to make a bit more money at the box-office, but poor marketing, a long stretch in development hell, and a change in director (Mulcahy was originally set to direct) might’ve played a part in that.

 

Rating: C+