Swim (2021)

Joey Lawrence takes top billing, but he really only features towards the end of this frankly shocking nonsense. He is having to drive from San Francisco to join his family at their annual seaside home because it's raining and his flight has been grounded. Meantime, his family arrive only to be warned that that self same storm is heading their way and that they had best skedaddle from their already leaky home. The warning? Well that's water off a duck's back, and shortly thereafter they are (deservedly) being besieged in the house by a hungry shark. As the water rises, the shark gets ever closer but of course, our Joey ("Hudson") arrives just in the nick of time to take control of the situation and rescue everyone from the predator. It's not so much that it's bad, this film, it's that it makes no effort whatsoever to be good - nor frightening or even plausible. A little bit of faux-gore, some scantily clad people screaming and a few CGI shots of a circling shark do not a thriller make! The dialogue is just banal and the ending - well suffice to say it doesn't make any sense at all - not even after an entire case of Malbec. Avoid, sorry - this is just a waste of mega-bites!

Lately I've been watching so much random stuff on Tubi, and *Swim* is a perfect example of what happens when you just keep scrolling and eventually say, "Sure, why not?"

Well, this is why not.

The premise is basically *Jaws* in a flooded house, which sounds ridiculous enough that it could have been a lot of fun. Unfortunately, *Swim* doesn't lean into the absurdity nearly enough. Instead, it's mostly people making questionable decisions, delivering clunky dialogue, and reacting to a shark that never manages to be particularly scary.

The effects are rough, the characters aren't interesting, and the attempts at suspense rarely work. Even by low-budget shark movie standards, there's not much here to recommend. I wasn't expecting *Jaws*, but I was at least hoping for some entertaining nonsense.

Instead, it mostly just made me question how deep into the Tubi catalog I've wandered.

**1/10. The shark deserved a better movie.**