Serial killer thriller or shark movie? Actually it's both

Sydney Morning Herald

11-06-2025

DANGEROUS ANIMALS ★★★
(MA15+) 98 minutes
It's impossible not to admire the skill with which this outlandish serial killer-cum-shark movie has been made, even as you're struck with its silliness and derivativeness.
Jai Courtney is the archetypal Aussie bloke, all swagger and thongs and flapping button-open surf shirt, his overly assertive bonhomie threatening any moment to tip over into outright hostility. Hell, he's even called Bruce Tucker; echoes there of Monty Python's Australians sketch (g'day, Bruce; g'day Bruce etc), and a dark joke about shark food (Bruce being the name of the mechanical shark in Jaws).
Unfortunately, jokes are otherwise a little thin on the ground in Dangerous Animals, as screenwriter Nick Lepard and director Sean Byrne lean heavily into the terror and the gore, with little by way of leavening humour. It's probably the biggest failing in a film that otherwise delivers plenty of generic thrills while also carving a unique identity within its familiar watery terrain.
Tucker is a fisherman on the Gold Coast who takes tourists out on his trawler to dive with sharks. He tosses chum into the water, then lowers his customers into it, inside the safety of a shark cage. That, at least, is the promise.
The reality is he's more interested in lowering them tethered and unprotected into a pool of blood, to which the sharks – makos, bulls, white pointers – will flock and feed in a frenzy. With his ancient RCA video camera trained on the scene, he will record for posterity their last moments. 'It's the greatest show on earth,' he mutters darkly as a victim is torn to shreds.
There's a distinct echo of John Jarratt's Mick Taylor about Tucker, and of Wolf Creek about the film as a whole. The same disdain for tourists and foreigners. The same sense of the self as an apex predator. The same sadistic pleasure in the dismemberment of a body, not for food but for fun. The Gold Coast has money in this film, but Tourism Australia, you can rest assured, does not.
A variety of innocents cross Tucker's path over the course of the film, but American Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) – a loner, a surfer, a former foster child with no attachments to speak of – is the one with whom Tucker most senses an affinity.