Crawl (2019)

Crawl is a fun albeit familiar human vs. beast movie, one that gets plenty of mileage out of its setting and people’s deep-set fear of being eaten.

This is precisely the type of movie we expect to see at the summer box office; an incessantly entertaining and dangerous adventure that will leave you breathless.

The entertainment value in a straight-up genre picture like this is how fraught each new corner of peril that they turn manages to be. And there’s plenty of that. And damned if Aja and his cast find some actual emotion in all this, too.

Crawl has a reptilian bite in its nods to the tradition of underwater monster flicks. It’s certainly not “Jaws” (what is?), or even “The Shallows,” but sloshing around the hazardous deluge of a Southwest Florida town on the brink of devastation by a Category 5 hurricane comes with its own kicks.

Accepting the film's own standard of plausibility, thrillseekers should appreciate the brisk pace with which scares, setbacks and possible escapes are delivered.