(as always, the following review WILL contain spoilers... turn back now or don't complain)
My interest in Piranha 3D was piqued by a few different things. When I heard that Alexandre Aja was on board to direct, I was pretty stoked. I loved High Tension, and was actually a pretty big supporter of his remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Then I started seeing the pictures of the Spring Breakers getting massacred, which got me really amped up. Then, the icing on the cake, the announcement of Richard Dreyfuss's cameo as Matt Hooper. So when I saw the movie last week, I went in to it expecting a few things. Tits. Some pretty cool kills. And a whole lot of fun.
And what did I get? A spectacular let down. Sure, it had the tits. Kelly Brook is a fox. No buts about that. So seeing her in all her glory for a good portion of the movie was definitely a treat. But the kills? The kills were one great big batch of weak sauce. In the opening act of the movie, everyone in the packed theater was having fun. People were laughing and having a good time. It was funny, it was shaping up to a be a pretty good popcorn flick. But every time the actual Piranha appeared it just sucked the energy out of the theater. It went for the same type of underwater, stalking, menacing shots that Jaws went for way back when, but there's a difference. The shark in Jaws was an animal, but it was also a character. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park was a character. Shit even the whale in Orca was a legitimate character and that was nothing but an exploitative knockoff.
When you make a point of telling the audience that there are thousands and thousands of interchangeable Piranha traveling in packs and feasting on anything that moves, it's kind of hard to make them seem like they're more than one dimensional (even if it's a 3d movie). The scenes that are shot from underwater, from the perspective of the piranha don't pack the same punch because it's not like it's a creature stalking it's prey. It's just a purely chaotic feeding frenzy. But back to my original point, every time the piranha showed up, the fun stopped and the pace just died.
Also, all but three kills were all pretty much the same. After a while you get a little tired of seeing bodies swirling around with a fountain of blood shooting skyward. But Eli Roth's cameo thankfully changes the pace a little bit.
Speaking of underwhelming deaths. And this is a major spoiler here, so stop reading now if that's not your bag. WHAT in the hell is the point in paying Ving Rhames to be in your movie if you're going to just straight up pussify him? He referred to himself as being too old and too out of shape early on in the movie. Then Elisabeth Shue called him chickenshit, which he didn't even contest. Even his defining moment in the movie, when he starts using the boat motor to kill the fish (as seen in the trailer), ends up making him look like a bitch. Sure he takes out some fish, but that's got to be one of the least satisfying movie deaths I've ever seen. Watch Dawn of the Dead 2004 and tell me that Ving Rhames should be portrayed as a brittle, fragile old man. When he walks into the lake, he looks like he's waddling and wearing a pair of cement shoes. It became abundantly clear to me that Samuel L. Jackson didn't want to take the part just to say the line "Chew on this motherfuckers", so they gave the part to Ving Rhames instead. Just, ugh, he deserved better than that.
And my other complaint about the movie is that it was another horror movie that gives away the ending in the trailer. (Quarantine or Paranormal Activity for example) What don't these studios understand about this? When you see a movie trailer over and over again for months, they register with you while you're watching the movie. And when you see Adam Scott getting knocked out of a boat by a giant fish in the trailer, you're going to expect to see it in the damn movie. So as the movies coming to an end, and you haven't seen Adam Scott get Piranha'd, you put two and two together and it ruins what would have been a pretty nifty little shock ending.
But now that the negativity is out of the way, there were some things that I did like about the movie. For one, Jerry O'Connell was picture perfect to play basically what amounted to an even sleazier Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame. Everything surrounding him was great. That couldn't have been done any better, and I usually hate everything that Jerry O'Connell touches. I hated Tomcats. I hated his show Carpoolers. But he was absolutely spot on perfect for his part in Piranha. Plus, if there's anybody that wonders what penis meat looks like on the inside, Jerry O'Connell will help you find out.
The acting was actually pretty good given that this was a movie about prehistoric piranha being unleashed by an old marine biologist that killed a great white shark thirty years ago, when he drops a bottle of Amity beer and causes an earthquake. Elisabeth Shue looked hot, and definitely deserved the top billing she got. Steven McQueen definitely made his grandfather proud, and is a capable action hero in the making. Even the child actors were pretty amusing and weren't a detriment to the movie as they tend to be in some other films.
The scene that made this movie worth seeing came directly after the spring break massacre when you saw the real damage that the fish did. The police officers are helping everyone out of the water and you see flesh ripped off people. Limbs are missing. You see just chunks of skin missing. That was the only time in the movie where I just sat there with my eyes widened and said Holy Shit. It had a similar affect on my date, except she had to look at the screen through her hands.
So it wasn't a total loss. I had more complaints than I would have liked, but I will say that there was never a dull moment. But when you're going to a horror flick, even one that's a little more lighthearted like Piranha 3D and you're having more fun with the few scenes of plot development than you are with the bloodshed and carnage, something definitely went wrong.
D-Bone's Rating: 4/10
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