Thrash (2026) – Fishy

Released: 10th April
Seen: 16th April

In 1975 Steven Spielberg changed the world of cinema forever by introducing the world to a shark named Bruce in the movie Jaws. Jaws was the original summer blockbuster, proving that action spectacle done well can be a massive hit at the box office. It’s also the quintessential shark movie, laying a blueprint for all other movies about sharks that would inevitably follow over the years. Shark movies are kind of ubiquitous at this point, every year there’s at least a couple and they can range from being surprisingly good to absolute dog shit, from serious to goofy. Then you get a film like Thrash which seems to be trying to see just how many kinds of shark movie it can copy during its runtime but just ends up making for a film that’s at best just kind of OK.

Thrash takes place in a quiet little town of Anniville, a place that’s about to be hit by a massive storm. We follow three groups of people, the first is a set of foster kids. Dee (Alyla Browne), Ron (Stacy Clausen) and Will (Dante Ubaldi) are living with seemingly abusive assholes Billy (Matt Nable) and Rachel (Amy Mathews) who are raising the kids as cheaply as they can so they can pocket the extra foster care money and are also adamant that the house that Billy built can withstand the oncoming storm… spoilers, it can’t. Meanwhile in a completely different part of town, agoraphobic Dakota (Whitney Peak) can’t leave her house to flee the obvious danger zone due to her aggressive agoraphobia that was brought on by the death of her mother. In fact, both of Dakota’s parents are dead but she has got an Uncle Dale (Djimon Hounsou) who will spend most of the movie trying to get to Dakota but only find her in the final minutes. Oh and after the levees break, Dakota ends up having to rescue Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a woman who is about to give birth who also didn’t flee the oncoming storm because of some reasons. Anyway as I mentioned, the levees break, everyone is stuck in their houses (which are nowhere near each other so these people never have to actually talk or meet at any point) and because a large truck full of animal blood that was just driving through town ends up rupturing in half, sharks come and so everyone has to deal with sharks.

So by that very brief description you can kind of tell one of Thrash’s big problems right away, it’s basically three different movies haphazardly sewn together in a way that kind of cheapens each part. We just start getting into what’s happening between Dakota and Lisa before we have to quickly run to check on the kids, then just as they start doing something interesting it’s back to Dakota and Lisa. These two stories have nothing to do with each other, indeed these characters will never meet, don’t live on the same street, don’t share the same rescue team or even the same kind of sharks. It’s like there were two different movies and they just got folded together to get the runtime up to the bare minimum 90 minutes. What sucks is that both stories on their own could make for an interesting set of movies, but Thrash doesn’t want to deal with the interesting elements of each one and instead just kind of rushes past them. It can’t even be bothered with any real transitions between the two settings, it just cuts back and forth between them like someone with ADHD grabbed the remote and started changing channels.

It’s not helping matters that none of the characters are memorable or interesting enough to be worth a damn. No one is expecting that much from characters in a shark attack movie, frankly they’re the least important elements of the thing (There are exceptions obviously, but this film isn’t one of them) because as long as they look horrifying while being turned into shark food that’s all we need but considering most of the characters I’ve named are meant to be our hero characters, they should at least be half interesting to watch. They’re not, they’re mostly blank slates that we’re told to care about because they just might be eaten by a shark and I’m sorry, but with characters this bland, I’m rooting for the shark. If they aren’t bland then, especially in the case of Billy, they’re so awful that Thrash has to come up with an excuse to get the shark to attack them multiple times to satiate the audience’s bloodlust. 

Speaking of those sharks, most of Thrash doesn’t really do enough interesting things with them. Sure, they have their moments, a shark swimming around a kitchen’s going to be unnerving even if it looks like shit, but there’s just no real tension here. Part of the problem could be that making a shark with CGI is so easy to do now that you just always see the damn thing and therefore never really wonder when it’s going to surprise you because you know what it’s dong at all times, there’s no real moment you don’t know where the shark is going to be or what it’s going to do. Hell, we can’t even be sure what it’s doing is going to kill the main characters, Billy had to be gnawed at a few times before going down so it’s not like they’re as scary as they could be considering the situation. 

Indeed, perhaps the biggest issue that Thrash runs into is that it just never knows what kind of shark film it wants to be. Some moments feel like a serious Jaws-style movie, others border on the campier Sharknado, there are a few moments that felt like the silly-but-still-scary Bait. At one point it just straight up turns into an Edgar Wright-style film full of quick cuts and zooms on certain actions; at another point it tries to feel like something from a 90s disaster film… none of these styles meshes well together and it doesn’t really have a valid reason to change style so often. Thrash doesn’t have transitions, it just changes shit because it’s bored and I don’t blame it for being bored because I was also bored for a lot of the time. It had some amusing moments, though it’s hard to know if those were intentionally funny or if I was so desperate for something amusing to happen that I tricked myself into laughing.

Look, Thrash isn’t completely unwatchable. It’s the kind of dumb movie that you can watch without actively hating that you watched it. You get a few half-decent shark scenes and maybe one actually cool shot but most of it is just kind of dull and forgettable. It’s not the kind of film that’s really gonna be on any real worst lists, but mostly just because no one’s going to remember this when the time comes to make those lists. It’s another in a long line of Netflix’s digital shelf stuffers, the kind of film that exists so they can say they actually have their own movies for people to watch but no one’s really clamouring to watch them.