I didn’t notice the telltale dorsal fin in the logo of The Devil’s Mouth (now on Prime Video) until after I watched it, so I didn’t realize the movie wasn’t a killer-giant-blobfish or sea-cucumbers-attack!! (or whatever) thriller until the idiot characters started getting their butts chomped in the second act. So much for seeing something new or interesting — but there’s always hope for innovations within the formula, right? Director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2, Imaginary) slaps bathing suits and swim fins on Kathryn Newton (Lisa Frankenstein) and Lana Condor (the To All the Boys movies) and sends them into some underground caves to dodge and parry with the pointiest fish in the sea, with mostly shrug-worthy results.
The Gist: This is the Bad Omens/Bad Decisions Vacation for this gaggle of college kids. They’re idiot Americans in Thailand incapable of deciphering myriad abandon all hope red flags regularly thrown in their path: the aggressive hissing monkey, the massive school of stinging jellyfish, the chomped-in-half sea turtle, the “skeleton cave” and the cavern full of dead fish, all signs telling them to GET OUT, but these people have apparently never seen a movie before, and I’d surmise that movies don’t exist in their reality if they hadn’t made some Finding Nemo references about just keeping swimming. Which leads one to conclude that they’re just stupid.
The dope squad is led by forever-besties duo Max (Condor) and Sara (Newton), Max’s boyfriend James (Nico Hiraga), and PDA-all-the-way couple Adrienne (Tommy Rose) and Greg (Gavin Casalegno). The trip is their last hurrah before they go home to be adults, with Max and Sara’s plans of staying together for all eternity thwarted by what’s essentially a staring contest: one job in LA and the other in NYC. Max is the alpha of the group, capable of talking people into doing whatever she wants, which is the type of trait that makes you root for the pointy fish and its nasty predatory instincts.
Case in point, how she persuades their kayaking/swimming tour guide (Tayme Thapthimthong) into not only taking the more “adventurous” route through the cave system known as the Devil’s Mouth, but also insisting on continuing with the venture despite various bad omens, warning signs and the advice of someone who, you know, actually knows what he’s talking about. So onward they go into obvious peril, in a competition to see which of them is the most annoying as they’re stalked by a bull shark who’s obviously a big fan of Alien and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Who among these five twits will survive? NO SPOILERS, amigos.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Devil’s Mouth is essentially The Descent crossed with — well, Jaws is the inevitable comparison, but this movie has less in common with a classic, or even a solid thriller like The Shallows, and far more in common with the middlingly forgettable sharknanigans of Under Paris or Thrash.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, the cavern full of dead fish is an unfortunate and accidental metaphor for the agency of these characters. But Newton does a reasonably commendable job of exonerating herself from some flaccid material.
Sex And Skin: Implied nudity in a skinnydipping scene.
Our Take: Next time, try vacationing at the Chipmunk’s Tuft instead of the Devil’s Mouth. There were so many signs. So many clues. So many opportunities to use common sense. But movies like this have no use for common sense and more use for nonsense, because nonsense provides more opportunities for untimely death at the hands, er, fins of a wildly toothy predator that didn’t attend university but nevertheless shows more significant signs of intelligence than what it’s hunting, e.g., intuiting our desire for these squabbling nincompoop smoothbrained humans to shut up, perhaps forever.
And so The Devil’s Mouth — please note the clever DOUBLE MEANING in the title exclamation point! — proceeds, never deviating from expectations, occasionally drawing out tension for payoffs that are never particularly surprising, thrilling, or dramatically invigorating. This is a classic case of checklist-as-screenplay, even beyond the ol’ pick-’em-off-one-by-one bromides: exotic setting (check), rudimentary character development (check), sharks-don’t-act-that-way behavior (check), karma in the form of a very hungry angry scary thing from the natural world exacting vengeance on “stoopid” obnoxious Americans in a foreign country (check). You’ve got your Jaws-y score tracking behind lots of BS jump scares, inopportune fainting, and just-a-dream fakeouts dragging the movie into mediocrity. At least we have a halfway decent CGI shark to root for, but it’s not enough. This movie is dead in the water.
Our Call: ~FIN~ SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.