Final Rating: 2/5
A group of TikTokers being chased by a clearly computer-animated alligator is a great premise for a joke. Bad CGI Gator, directed by Danny Draven, pulls that joke off brilliantly. And then it keeps trying to do it again with rapidly diminishing returns.
During Spring Break, a group of Gen Z students rent a cabin in the swamps of South Georgia for a weekend of drinking, hooking up, and filming videos. After a freak accident mutates the local wildlife, the group find themselves at the mercy of a vindictive alligator as it chomps them up one by one.
Gator knows what the audience is there to see. Once the gator arrives, it’s the star of the show. Big enough to take up most of the frame, the gator’s movements are awkward, either forcing the creature to stretch in ways its body shouldn’t or jerk around as if animating actual movement was too difficult. The visual effects team really understood the assignment here: the gator looks bad, but it doesn’t look incompetent. The incongruity of the monster with the rest of the film is fully played up, with some of the characters even commenting on the gator’s “otherworldly” appearance in the final minutes of the film. Several sequences feel tailor-made to be converted into 4-second Twitter videos.
The human characters exist to feed the gator. They’re thinly-written classic high school archetypes – jock, bimbo, nerd, rebel – who speak exclusively in Gen Z slang (although the writers don’t seem to know or care what any of those words mean). They pay lip-service to social causes while building their lives around social media fame and partying. The paper-thin personalities are clearly by design, with the filmmakers mining caricature for plenty of jokes early on. After the first few minutes, however, the lack of actual character writing leads to punchlines getting old fast.
At a technical level, Gator is good, but not great. It’s consistently well-lit, with some inspired editing choices keeping it fresh and enticing to watch. The music is professional, though it leans slightly goofier than it should, which doesn’t help the groan-worthy comedy in the last half to land. Even Danny Draven’s directing is laudable for the performances he manages to get out of his cast.
Clocking in at just under an hour, Gator gets an impressive amount of mileage out of its titular joke. Unfortunately, it has little else to offer and ends up wearing out its welcome fast.
Thank you to Scandal Co-Active for the screener.
Comments
Comments are closed.