Directed by Jeff Wadlow (True Memoirs of an International Assassin) — Screenplay by Aja Gabel and Myung Joh Wesner.
Jeff Wadlow’s The Devil’s Mouth follows a group of friends on vacation in Thailand. Two of the friends, Sara (played by Kathryn Newton) and Max (played by Lana Condor), initially struggle to see eye to eye after the former is left behind in the ocean, while the rest of the group partied and sped off without realizing where she was. Although they did eventually come back for her, the encounter left Sara badly damaged after coming into contact with a school of jellyfish. Sara feels that Max won’t take responsibility for anything, and yet still insists on controlling what to do, so while they try to get over the aforementioned incident, those issues always sit just beneath the surface. When, one day, they decide to tour the titular underwater cave system, chaos ensues as a trapped bull shark attacks and kills their guides. Now, the group must work together if they want to all make it out alive.
What we have here is a B-movie creature survival thriller with a particularly aggressive bull shark and a group of American tourists at its center. Ultimately, how much you’ll get out of it depends on your relationship with these kinds of films, because it makes so many of the kinds of B-movie record-scratching mistakes that one might imagine a shark movie with two up-and-coming actresses could make. This is the kind of movie where screaming at the top of your lungs above water makes the shark change direction underwater. This is the kind of movie where, as if it were a T-Rex in Jurassic Park, a flare flung around above water makes the bull shark change direction underwater. This is the kind of film where a shark will repeatedly bash its head into rocks if the plot demands it. If you want realism in your shark-based survival thrillers, then this isn’t the movie for you.
However, if you still like B-movie shark features that have a relatively solid location and a high number of shark-human interactions, so to speak, then I think you could still have a good time with this. I say this even though some of the decent underwater cave system locations, or sets, look indistinguishable from one another. In a way, this works, since characters constantly get lost in there, but, on the other hand, the different parts of the cave system perhaps ought to have looked and felt more distinct. Also, the film has got eye-roll-inducing forced drama between characters, silly and yet quite mean-spirited shark attack moments, and some really obnoxious characters who are really only there to be red shirts, so to speak.
The shark effects aren’t great. It looks fine in the early stages of the film when the shark is mostly unseen, as the film relies on showing the fin or shadows (i.e., it moving in the background where you can only really tell its shape). Early shark attacks aren’t visible to such an extent that the scenes look awful. In these scenes, we mostly see a guy being moved hurriedly and violently halfway above water due to the violence happening underwater. But, in later stages, when the shark starts jumping at people, its computer-generated look isn’t particularly convincing.
What kept me interested in the film, other than the fact that B-movie shark flicks can sometimes become quite entertaining, was the fact that it, as I mentioned earlier, features two up-and-coming actors who are overqualified for the material they got to work with here. I am, of course, talking about Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor. This feels like a strange step backwards for actors who — in Condor’s case — led an immensely popular rom-com trilogy and have — in Newton’s case — appeared in plenty of relatively high-profile horror movies in recent years. Their involvement elevates the film quite a bit for me, and they overcome the fact that their characters are relatively thinly drawn.
As a sidenote, I will add that I kept thinking that perhaps they were both also miscast and would’ve been better in each other’s parts given the kinds of roles they’ve made their names with. I often think Newton is best when her character gets to be a little bit cheeky, while Condor is more known for being well-reasoned in her most famous film series. That’s not really what they get to do here. However, perhaps that role reversal was what interested them in the parts. One can only speculate. In any case, Jeff Wadlow’s The Devil’s Mouth won’t be a high mark in either Newton or Condor’s careers, but it is rather a strange detour in their career rise to relative stardom.
4 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
