Chum opens with a meandering, overly formal, almost sleepwalk-inducing voiceover describing something horrible that happened offscreen. When the voiceover ends, that horrible something plays out in front of us with no detail spared, which begs the question: Why did we need the voiceover in the first place?
There's a lot of that happening in Chum, the latest film in a long, illustrious, often schlocky line of Jaws successors. The concept is alluring, the scenery is lovely, and no one needs an excuse to make another killer shark movie, but at every turn this film packs baffling, often derailing choices in among the flashes of horror fun. I truly don't know whether to tell you this movie is bad in a fun way or just plain bad, because I found the experience of watching it more puzzling than anything else. So, let's talk through it.
On the island of Malta, lawyer Tina (Alice Eve) is finally settling down with her dream man, investment banker and activist Tom (Eric Michael Cole) via a gorgeous destination wedding. To celebrate, Tom's best man Rick (Johnny Gaffney) rents out a catamaran to sail the bride, groom, and bridesmaids around the Mediterranean for the day. Again, the scenery's great, the bikinis are on, everyone's having a good time, until a fire forces the group to abandon ship. Fortunately, they're swiftly picked up by fisherman Roy (Jim Klock), who promises to get them back to shore and even offers them food. This detour turns into a nightmare, though, because it turns out Roy is the guy from that weird voiceover from before! He's got a tragic backstory tied to a Great White Shark who's inexplicable roaming the Mediterranean, and there's only way to lure that shark in for revenge: Live, human bait!
Why is Roy the only person who seemingly knows about this Great White roaming where it's not supposed to roam? Shouldn't marine biologists be tracking this phenomenon, which is repeatedly mentioned on the news? Why is the shark seemingly well-fed even though it apparently only wants to eat humans now? These are not questions we should be asking! The more important question is why Chum takes more than half of its 86-minute runtime to get to the meat of its premise. Grief-Crazed Weirdo Named Roy Uses Humans as Live Shark Bait is a great premise, even if Dangerous Animals did a better version of a very similar premise just last year, and it's right there in the trailer for this film! But Chum seems determined to explain to you why you're meant to care about these people for a massive chunk of a short movie, devoting swaths of screentime to repetitive conversations meant to showcase drama in the wedding party which instead only serve to drag the movie away from its beating exploitation cinema heart.
But even these diversions would be a bit more forgivable if the film could muster a little more proficiency when it comes to the basic tools of cinema. Director and co-writer Jonathan Zuck clearly has a taste for the film's chosen subgenre, and when he's able to cut loose and just play with killer sharks there is fun to be had, but the film seems to sleepwalk its way through everything else. We're talking about a movie shot on location, with loads of open ocean and beautiful coastline, not to mention views looking out across seaside cliffs. There is so much production value waiting to be snatched up, and yet the film seems to go out of its way to choose the most uninspired staging for all of the pre-Roy sequences.
Making matters worse is the dialogue, most of which is delivered via some of the worst dubbing I can remember hearing in the last few years. I can only assume that filming on the open ocean, with boat noise and wind and surf to contend with, meant that the dialogue recorded live was unusable, so the production had to resort to ADR. It's an understandable technical challenge, but the dialogue dubbed in sounds flat, both in inflection and in the sound mix, like everyone's talking from the inside of a closet. There aren't that many memorable lines anyway, but the ones that do land lost quite a bit of their punch through this process. Throw in some clunky CGI shark action and the film almost entirely slips away.
And yet…somehow it doesn't. For all its flatness, its rickety technical issues, and its insistence on dragging out the narrative before getting to the Good Stuff, there's something fun lurking in Chum, and a lot of it comes through Klock's performance as Roy. He understands exactly the movie he's in, even if no one else does, and he commits completely to playing this madman with a broken heart, even when his dialogue strains credulity and the film around him isn't really keeping up. Eve, who also served as a producer on the film, handles herself well enough, and everyone else is just sorta there, but Klock makes Chum instantly more watchable in a sort of basic cable movie of the week sort of way.
So yes, there are reasons to watch Chum, especially if you're a killer shark movie completist, but the overall impression I have of this film is one of bafflement. It's too self-serious to be a straight-up exploitation cinema gorefest, and too gruesome to play to whatever strengths it might have had as a psychological drama. It's a ship too big to steer into the shallows, and yet it seems frightened to go all the way out into open water. That leaves it strangely adrift in a sea of strange choices and clunky filmmaking, but there's, somehow, still just enough blood in the water to draw you in, if only for a while.
Chum is out now in theaters and on digital.
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