Bait (2012) Review

Bait (2012) Review

 

After the success of Piranha 3D in the summer of 2010, it seemed likely there would be an influx of waterborne natural horror films shot in the third dimension following its success, but there were only a few, with the two most notable being Shark Night 3D and Bait 3D. While Shark Night was a pitiful movie-going experience, Bait was more enjoyable, but still very flawed.

It’s business as usual at the Oceania supermarket, until a tsunami devastates Queensland’s shores and traps a bunch of people in the store, along with a very hungry great white shark that patrols the flooded aisles. It definitely leans into that survival horror scenario, and combines a killer animal with a natural disaster in a somewhat more realistic fashion than something of a lower caliber like Sharknado. It also tries to be character-focused, but none of the characters are unique or engaging. This is a very typical collection of walking clichés seen in dozens of other films of the genre, and while they aren’t so annoying that you’ll regret the shark didn’t eat everyone by the end, it’s not like you’ll be cheering for their survival either.

Bait feels like it could have been one of the Jaws sequels had one of the characters been connected to the Brody family. It’s the same thing we’ve seen before with a familiar cast of characters being attacked by a mindless great white, only in a new setting, and with a bit more on-screen violence than anything from Jaws. For the first half, the shark is seen very little and none of the kills are very gratuitous. When the characters do finally spot the shark, I find it funny how not dramatic it is. Normally the toothy predator explodes out of the water or there’s a huge swell of music and everyone freaks out—there’s some kind of dramatic reveal—but here, the shark just casually swims past the camera, and everyone goes, “oh, no, it’s a great white!” and that’s it. With the exception of a couple gory kills, the shark attack scenes are pretty standard and poorly shot.

There are a few good ideas in this straightforward story that stand out. One is a sequence where a character must don a makeshift shark suit constructed with materials from around the store, like tin cans to weigh him down and metal racks to act as armour. He has a hose attached so he can breathe, and he trudges through the water, past the shark, and makes it all the way to the breaker box so he can turn off the power, because a loose wire is hanging from the ceiling and the rising water puts pressure on them to shut the power off as quickly as possible, otherwise they’ll all be electrocuted and killed. A few other fun moments include a character crawling along a pipe on the ceiling and another character filling the role of the film’s title in being live bait. However, as I mentioned before, none of these characters are that fun to be stuck with in this survival situation. There’s a couple trapped in a car that offer some laughs, but otherwise the dialogue will make your eyes roll. 

Despite what the poster seems to indicate, the shark is actually an animatronic in most shots, and it looks decent. The quality is somewhere between the stiff plastic effects in the later Jaws sequels and the realistic, dynamic effects in Deep Blue Sea, though more on the side of Jaws. The cgi, on the other hand, is awful, but not as low-resolution-awful as something made for TV. I’m not giving it a pass on those grounds alone; it is horribly fake-looking and shatters the illusion in every shot it’s used in. That being said, if the cgi had been better, it probably wouldn’t have improved the movie overall in any big way.   

With typical genre suspense and characters, mainly sub-par effects, and an anticlimactic ending, Bait sounds like it’s worth skipping, but I actually enjoyed it more than I expected. It’s a little too serious and not fun enough, unevenly riding the line of campy and scary, but for the big fans of this genre, it’s worth checking out at least once, as long as your expectations are kept low.