When you settle down to watch a shark film called Chum, you know you’re bound to witness something so silly yet entertaining enough to justify the time watching it. Sadly, that is very much not the case; the film instead is an exercise in utilising AI in all the wrong ways, which results in it being the worst film of the year so far, and any year.
Shark films don’t seem that difficult to get right; throw in some good kills and a menacing shark, and you have yourself a recipe for success. None has ever topped Steven Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece Jaws, and it’s starting to feel like none ever will. In fact, Chum makes The Devil’s Mouth, another shark film released this year, look like Jaws in comparison.
The film starts at a destination wedding in Malta, as Tina (Alice Eve) and Tom (Eric Michael Cole) invite friends and family to share their special day with them. Things seem a bit off between the happy couple and, before we know it, they’re forced onto a boat trip with their friends the day after. Now, seeing as we don’t get any reasoning for the tension between Tina and Tom until a bit further in, and none of the friends or family on the boat with them feel like proper characters, it’s hard to actually care about any single one of them. It makes them totally disposable, yet it would be nice to actually care about one or two of them, or why bother watching at all?
Then there’s the film’s shark action. It’s so obvious that AI has been used heavily when it comes to any scene that the shark is present in that it genuinely becomes so distracting to the point it totally takes you out of the film. It’s like stock footage of sharks in nature blended with visual effects, and the results are disastrous. It looks comical, and it looks fake, and for some reason they decide to add a cartoonish crunch sound every single time someone gets attacked. It really takes away the stakes in the film when the shark just doesn’t feel threatening. With this utilisation of AI, director Jonathan Zuck commits the cardinal sin of making a shark film boring and utterly laughable.
The shark may be more believable than the performances, mind, no one covering themselves in glory at all. Alice Eve has been in some big films in her career, yet she finds herself here adrift at sea facing off against a half-baked revenge plot and the least scary shark in cinematic history. Even being a producer on the film doesn’t make Eve put any effort into her performance, which says it all really. She is, however, the best of a bad bunch, with other performances feeling hilarious but not even to the point you could class them as so bad they’re good.
Chum is a lazy film that’s not interested in trying to leave a mark of quality on its audience. It feels like the results of an AI workshop passed off as a film that should never have seen the light of day. Much less of this, please, Hollywood.
NO STARS
Available on Digital Download from August 17 / Alice Eve, Eric Michael Cole, Elle Haymond / Dir: Jonathan Zuck / Independent Film Company, Strike Media / 15
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