Crawl is a cross between a disaster movie and chamber play. Two people with melodrama get stuck in a fixed locale because of circumstances beyond their control (but maybe not really…) and are forced to work out their issues while attempting an egress. Crawl retrofits its setup into a monster movie by having the “place” be the slowly flooding crawlspace under a home in rural Florida during a hurricane and adding the X-factor of large, hungry alligators that have suddenly found human neighborhoods much more navigable as hunting grounds.
Kaya Scodelario is a frustrated collegiate swimming champ off her game amidst her parents’ recent divorce. Barry Pepper is the once-doting, now estranged dad she (correctly) intuits has failed to evacuate their former family home during “The Big Storm.” He’s got a broken leg and bad gator wounds; she’s got anxiety to get over if she wants to out-swim gators. They’ve both got about an hour before the flood finishes them off, reptiles or not. That’s… pretty much the movie. It’s not complicated — but it works.
This is Escape to the Movies with MovieBob, talking about Crawl.
