By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I’m a big shark movie fan. So much so that I made an entire podcast series about aquatic creature horror, Fin Flicks. This is all to say that I’m well-versed in the realm of this particular subgenre and was eagerly anticipating Dangerous Animals. The buzz on the movie had been good and I expected to enjoy it.
What I didn’t expect was it angling to overthrow The Monkey as my favorite film of the year.
The Story of Dangerous Animals
Dangerous Animals centers around Tucker (Jai Courtney), the charismatic owner of an excursion company that takes tourists out to cage dive with sharks. It turns out that Tucker is a serial killer who captures his victims and feeds them to sharks while he films the whole ordeal.
Meanwhile, lonely drifter Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is ambling about Australia, looking for some good places to surf. She has a meet cute with rich prettyboy Moses (Josh Heuston) but can’t quite commit to this new connection. This leads her right into the waiting jaws of Tucker and our survival thriller is underway.
Jai Courtney Gives the Performance of the Year
Tucker is a stupendous villain on the page, but Jai Courtney breathes incredible life into him. I don’t think I’ve seen a Jai Courtney performance that fully won me over before, but Dangerous Animals gives him the greatest screen role of his career. Tucker is a magnetic monster that commands the screen every second he gets. Every little piece we get with him makes him all the more terrifying and captivating.
It’s no hyperbole to say Jai Courtney has delivered my absolute favorite performance of the year. By the time the year is over, he might also be my favorite villain of the year.
A Shark Movie Unlike Any Other
We’ve been inundated with similar kinds of shark flicks ever since Jaws decided to be the greatest movie ever made. Dangerous Animals did something of a minor miracle by crafting a shark story that we’ve never seen before. It also makes a concerted effort to make sure you understand the point of the movie’s title: the dangerous animals ain’t the sharks.
I love sharks in real life, so it’s always been weird to be such a fan of movies that paint them as monsters. Dangerous Animals manages to make a moral statement about sharks as natural beings while also delivering the bloody goods.
Dangerous Animals has a committed cast, knockout direction, a stellar script, it looks gorgeous, the edit is the tightest I’ve seen from any movie this year, and it’s a ripper of a flick. If you are looking for an original story that fires on all cylinders, you have got to set aside some time for Dangerous Animals. I know it probably won’t be anyone else’s favorite movie of the year, but it’s really aiming for the top of the heap in my book.
