Chum
The surface is calm, serene, gentle waves of the Mediterranean Sea lapping at the shores of the exclusive Malta resort where Mr and Mrs Tom and Tina Barclay have just exchanged vows and rings, her father delivering a speech about how his concerns were washed away as he saw the devotion of his future son-in-law, the former Greenpeace activist turned investment banker now married to an ambitious lawyer.
Tom spending his wedding night passed out on the beach rather than in the honeymoon suite, best man Rick and their friends have organised a celebratory cruise, he reticent because of his hangover and Tina because she can’t swim (except when she can except when she can’t), the secret she spills to her friends is that the marriage is already on the rocks over her acceptance of a job with an oil firm, while beneath the waves a hungry shark with a taste for human flesh seeks fresh meat.
Directed by Jonathan Zuck, one of five credited screenwriters on Chum, can it be presumed that as each draft of the script was passed around the overriding note from the twenty producers was “can we make these people more useless and more unlikeable?” Tom and torn-faced bride Tina (Eric Michael Cole and Alice Eve) planning their annulment the day after the wedding, the question becomes why they bothered going through the vast expense of their fancy destination wedding in the first place, and are these awful people really their closest friends?
Tina telling her BFFs the situation and swearing them to secrecy, they spread the gossip faster than blood spilled in salt water, the inability of the couple to approach their differences as adults and find compromise interrupted by the arrival of the shark, a mix of actual footage and cheap effects, the captain going for pirate peg-leg look as he offers his leg for hors d’oeuvres, the radio broken and the catamaran exploding after someone cleverly drops a rescue flare in the engine.
Help at hand with shark hunter Roy (Jim Clock) whose voiceover would shame a school play adaptation of Moby Dick, he is not there to rescue them but seeking bait to lure the shark which killed his wife, quite how he tagged and tracked it never quite clear as he didn’t actually witness her death, only the aftermath, and his failure to eliminate his quarry for five years meaning he is quite the terrible hunter and that he’s gone through a fair few homeless folk in the interim; does he have a paying job and just do this at weekends, who knows?
The hostages obeying the rules of captivity, that they must never coordinate plans and always wait until an attempt to subdue their host fails before launching their own challenge, and that the correct way to use a harpoon gun is to hit the target with the barrel rather than shoot them, it is also necessary when approaching from behind to scream rather than sneaking, while Tina’s uber-gen Z sister Sadie (Elle Haymond) apathetically regards the whole situation as someone else’s problem until finally offering grudging encouragement rather than assistance; with people as worthless as this, it’s team shark for the win.
Chum will available on digital download from Monday 17th August
