“I BEAT JAWS,” reads a headline that a serial killer named Tucker (Jai Courtney) has framed in his boat to commemorate his unexpected survival against a shark. This reference early in Dangerous Animals, directed by Sean Byrne and written by Nick Lepard, serves to reinforce just how large the legend of Jaws looms a half-century after its initial release. It’s not the wisest decision for any film to invoke a classic like Jaws, especially one that can’t begin to hold a candle to Steven Spielberg’s mastery of suspense and spectacle.
Dangerous Animals, an unsuccessful fusion of creature feature and slasher, hits choppy waters early as it sets up its dual story. In a cold open before the title card drop, unassuming couple Heather (Ella Newton) and Greg (Liam Greinke) board Tucker’s bright orange vessel in order to cage dive with sharks. The beasts they fear are underwater, but the one they should have been looking out for is waiting for them on the deck when they resurface.
The film then cuts abruptly to Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a surfer intent on avoiding any attachments that might keep her from the Australian waves. She tries to shake off the request to use her van’s jumper cables from Moses (Josh Heuston), a real estate agent she encounters outside a convenience store. But once he threatens to reveal that he caught Zephyr shoplifting, she gives in to his needs—and shortly thereafter falls into bed with him for a one-night stand.
Zephyr runs out before Lepard’s screenplay can give anything beyond vague intimations of her personality. She’s almost instantly kidnapped outside of her van by Tucker and held captive on his boat, where he intends to film his ritualistic feedings of her and Heather to the sharks below. (Moses, then, makes for little more than a convenient plot device, as he’s the one person who has the slightest idea of her whereabouts.) From there, Dangerous Animals spends over an hour of its runtime drawing out Zephyr’s simple dilemma: escape or get eaten.
The film attempts to position Tucker as a foil to Zephyr, with our Big Bad even comparing himself and his captive to sharks. Both are solitary creatures, he argues, resisting connection to others in their own way. It’s a comparison that might have fallen less flat had Dangerous Animals spent more time trying to understand either of these characters as humans. This attempt to supplant genre sensationalism with a protracted battle of wits between Tucker and Zephyr as Moses tries to connect the dots on shore robs the film of fun and frights alike.
Zephyr is ultimately too thin of a character to hang an entire movie around, especially one like this that wants to go deeper than your run-of-the-mill Ozploitation flick. Courtney, at least, has some fun sinking his teeth into the ridiculousness of his character. The scenes where the actor fully lets loose provide flashes of what a different (read: better) movie might have looked like if the filmmakers had built the story around him as an antihero protagonist.
Either way, Dangerous Animals cannot reconcile the dualities it presents within the character. The story doesn’t have enough meat on its bones to satisfactorily explain how the same Tucker who dances in his skivvies following his successful taping of a human sacrifice to the sharks below is also the same man who waxes philosophical in speeches to Zephyr. Byrne’s film even serves up an undercooked metaphor for Tucker as a would-be director, given the way he attempts to compose the frames of his sadistic kills behind the lens of a camera. It’s a pity that the sharks are the only ones being fed by the action within Dangerous Animals.
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