The lead character of Crawl is Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario), a College-aged swimmer who is determined to win any of her swims meets at all costs. Frustrated at narrowly losing a recent match, she heads back down her Florida hometown to check up on her unresponsive father, Dave Keller (Barry Pepper), whose home is in the middle of a major hurricane. A quick check-up turns into something more elaborate as Haley learns that her Dad is actually at her childhood home. Scratch that, he's unconscious in the basement of her childhood home. Now she's gotta drag up her Dad in the middle of a hurricane, which is quickly flooding the basement and bringing in an array of crocodiles in their path.
From there, the screenplay keeps the film refreshingly simple. Haley's just gotta get her Dad to safety while navigating her unresolved trauma stemming from her parent's divorce. Shockingly, the human drama in Crawl, usually the part of these monster movies that makes one wanna leave and go get a popcorn refill (*cough*Godzilla: King of the Monsters*cough*) is actually pretty solid. Like Child's Play from a few weeks ago, Crawl doesn't rewrite the book on intimate human drama storytelling but both films create underlying conflicts between their respective casts of characters that actually can fit into their differing brands of horror chaos rather than work against it. It doesn't feel like Crawl is just pausing to deliver character exploration out of a sense of obligation, instead it emerges in a far more organic fashion that constantly keeps your attention.
It's helpful too that Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper are delivering lead performances that show commitment to the material they're given, they're not just delivering wooden line deliveries while expecting the crocodile violence to distract viewers from their performances. In their work in the lead roles, we see yet another way Crawl totally goes above and beyond expectations to a welcome degree. Though the human drama is better written and performed than usual for a monster movie, that's not the reason people are going to see Crawl. This movie's elegantly straightforward premise offers up plenty of time for just what everybody that paid for a ticket for Crawl wants: crocodile mayhem. Crawl has got your crocodile mayhem in spades and it offers it up in such a fun and tense fashion.
Turns out, a conventional suburban house and typical surroundings you'd find near by (like a gas station, for instance) are prime locations for suspenseful crocodile mayhem to transpire. It never fails to be entertaining and thrilling to see crocodiles swimming around and chasing humans in places you wouldn't expect them to be. Plus, Crawl eventually moves the crocodiles to other parts of Haley's childhood house beyond just the basement, so there's no sense of repetition in the various crocodile-laden set pieces. Turns out there's a lot of variety in crocodile chase scenes and that sense of variation helps Crawl be a consistently taut creative endeavor.
In the highest compliment I can offer a creature feature horror film like this, Crawl had me curling up my toes and gripping my armrest in suspense plenty of times throughout. Aside from a few instances where my suspension of disbelief was broken by Haley sustaining injuries that should have hindered her swimming abilities more than they do, Crawl constantly kept me submerged in its playful brand of underwater carnage that manages to never overstay its welcome (thank you 88-minute runtime!) The kind of giddily violent monster movie that should be only shown at drive-in movie theaters, Crawl delivers a kind of crocodile rock you can't help but boogie down with.
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