Chum

A couple of unhappily married newlyweds go on a boat trip on the morning after their wedding, only for disaster to strike in the form of an overly aggressive shark and a psychotic trawler captain with an existential axe to grind.

It seems odd that anyone would want to try to remake, or attempt to make their own, Jaws (1975). Perfection should be left alone. Not even Steven Spielberg wanted to have another crack at it, and this was after the unprecedented runaway success of the first one, where he had single-handedly created the phenomenon of the summer blockbuster. But of course, this is 2026, and in the intervening fifty years everything has been deemed to be up for grabs, and nobody has any shame any more, so rather than reverence and a healthy amount of distance, we instead have an entire subgenre of shark-porn which includes the endless chomping up of body parts and oceans of blood bubbling to the surface.

Most of the modern shark movies tend to come in as self-referential, trying to be ironically funny, torture-porn moved to the sea, types of affairs, that know they’re bad (if not just quite how bad), but every so often one comes along that thinks it’s pure drama and takes itself seriously enough to bypass all the things that allow people to keep watching this nonsense. Chum, is one of those.

With an intro scene straight-up ripped from Jaws, just with some supremely inferior editing going on, and a hammy, pseudo-philosophical voiceover instead of the iconic John Williams music, Chum sets out its stall as a cheap, less than B-movie, knock-off, that is going to make us sit through every shark trope under the sun. Lo-and-behold, what we get is eighty-six minutes of inane drivel, where a boatload of fuckwits get thrown overboard and ground into mincemeat by the sharp, pointy teeth of a fearsome, somehow sentient and overly-emotional, sea predator.

In true Gen-Z style, there is only a minimal amount of setup and absolutely no characterisation involved in getting everybody onto the boat, with an ensemble of trust-fund responsibility shirkers filling out our roster of shark food. There’s this guy, and that guy, and a couple of bikini women with big, inflatable, life-buoys strapped to their chests (even sharks have to contend with their food being contaminated by micro-plastics these days), and Alice Eve, who also stumped up enough cash to be credited as a producer on this displeasure cruise.

Alice and her beau hate each other, but they got married anyway, because, hey it’s 2026 and we do what we like. They’re in Malta, where the dangerous sharks don’t usually go, but by golly that’s a good time to shoehorn in some trite virtue-signalling about climate change and the changing feeding patterns of sea predators, even though the entire production overuses AI in its feeding frenzy sequences and must have swallowed up an entire island nation’s worth of potable water in generating this slop. But, you know, we’ll make the point anyway, because we can’t do our own research and even when we’re holding one opinion whilst simultaneously acting in an antithetical manner, we’ll argue about it until we die, or at least get our face onto some fascist’s debate-porn blog.

So, obviously, the sailing trip goes bad, and is literally sunk to the bottom of the ocean, when a gnarly sea-captain comes along to save the day and fishes the vacuous ones from the water. He’s not the hero he makes out to be, however, and soon he’s over-expositioning everything in a dire monologue that lays everything out on the deck. He’s the one in the voiceover who lost his wife in the intro sequence, and after tracking the shark that did it, for years all over the seven seas, he’s come to the point where he’s trying live human bait to catch the anthropomorphised killer.

Such is the extent of ‘story’ that we get from Chum, and then we must watch as one by one everybody gets munched on by AI sharks, and reams of AI blood are spilled into the crystal waters of the Mediterranean. Almost everything in Chum is rushed and shoddily done, from the laughable wooden acting, to the non-existent script, to the disgustingly bad continuity, to the aforementioned lack of skilled, paid work in the visual effects. Only the cinematography above the water line, of the coast and the horizon, and the rather gruesome ripping apart of bodies under the water, offers any sort of affecting moments for the audience, while everything else flounders and eventually drowns in its own incompetence.

Chum is a prime example of where modern filmmaking for the TikTok generation is going. It scrapes its ideas from old classics and strips everything of value or merit from them, eschewing involved themes and storylines, or complex characterisation, for those who can no longer hold these things in their heads for any length of time, and packages it in dumbed-down bitesize chunks that have no meaning or weight behind them, just so that some torture-porn gooners can get their adrenaline fix for the hour before they go and find some other trash to consume.

It would be best if films like this were never made at all, but in the modern age it seems the best we can do is stay well away from them, and resolutely refuse to pay any money to see them, so that they hopefully sink without a trace into the deep blue depths where nobody but the fishes are troubled by them.

Chum will be available on Digital Download from 17th August