j* Movie Reviews 2019

Bait (2012)

I'm always up for a new ride around Shark-Town. In some ways shark-films are what dinosaur films could be, but for some reason aren't. They're a ghostly-haunting of the psyche made somehow fishily tangible. A consistent character of fairly known quantity; shark films are only differentiated by the other characters and the situations they're put in. Seaside towns, science labs, tornadoes, water slides... and in this instalment, the supermarket.

Things that are great about this is that it was an Australian-Singapore production. Filmed in Queensland, at a beach that if I don't actively recognise it, just feels engrained in my psyche. And the characters are so Aussie, with great lackadaisical dialogue. You've got a really solid cast of local faces here, including King Wally Lewis's son Lincoln who plays a great himbo. In terms of tone, he's partnered with a Paris Hilton rip-off... suggesting that even in 2012 some people were still feeling the early-00s zeitgeist.

The gist of the film is that there's a tsunami. And it hits a local supermarket at a particularly opportune moment, trapping people inside the water-filled aisles. But they're not alone... some big sharks are trapped in there too. So it's an escape and survival flick. Obviously a few people die.

It's a film that has put a lot of thought into blood-in-the-water design... some of the most artistic of these scenes here. It is also quite fun to see the cute CGI (?) fishes swimming around the shelving. The effects are often pretty clunky.

The other thing I really liked about this film is it goes into weird ideas quickly. I feel in a normal film, if someone has a good idea there's often discussion around what it is and how it might work, and how to make it work best. In this, suddenly they're just doing something and you have no idea what the plan is. It's almost like the characters psychically agreed to all sorts of odd ideas. My favourite involves a lot of metal mesh and dogfood cans. I think that's all I can say without getting spoilery. But that scene alone gave me a lot of wtf moments.

So there are great bits, novel bits, things you've not seen in a shark movie before. But at the end of the day I found the character relationships all a bit convenient and contrived, I wasn't nervous enough about the shark, and I thought there was probably more whacky fun that could be had in a supermarket filled with sharks.

J* gives it 2 stars.

PS. This film came to my attention in a great rant someone was having about Australian Films and the industry being too highbrow, and that they might have a deadset vendetta against "genre" film. The argument I was seeing was that in 2012 people were raving about The Sapphires being the most successful Australian film, yet BAIT blitzed it. It is also made interesting by where the box office money came from.

The Sapphires: ~$20mill worldwide (with USA, mostly Aus)

BAIT: ~$32 mill worldwide (most of it from China, no USA, tiny Aus).

It does appear that in many Australian film reports, BAIT is a film that does not exist. This is weird. I don't truly know how to get to the bottom of the situation, but I am glad that this kind of whacky discrepancy was brought to my attention. Without knowing the full ins and outs, at least on the surface it really does appear that for some reason BAIT is part of a cultural cringe in (Screen) Australia. One of the few times it is mentioned on the Screen Australia website is in this analysis of TOP (Aussie) Films Outside Australia... BAIT is number 3! So at least the numbers got it on a list somewhere... even though it's not on comparable lists available on the rest of the site.