Piranha

A remake of Joe Dante’s eponymous 1978 thriller, Piranha follows an eclectic assortment of characters as they’re forced to fend for their lives after the blood-thirsty title creatures launch a vicious attack during spring break. Director Alexandre Aja kicks the film off with a promising yet disappointing sequence in which a hapless fisherman (Richard Dreyfuss) is brutally assaulted by dozens of piranha, with the interlude’s effectiveness diminished by an emphasis on laughably inept computer-generated special effects. The underwhelming vibe persists for much of the movie’s opening hour, as Aja, working from Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg’s screenplay, augments the all-too-familiar storyline with a decidedly less-than-fresh selection of characters – which effectively ensures that Piranha, in its early stages, is simply unable to sustain the viewer’s interest for more than a few minutes at a time. (This is despite the presence of several scene-stealers within the cast, including Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, and Adam Scott.) It’s not until the deadly aquatic creatures launch their assault in earnest that the film finally becomes the fun horror-movie ride that one might’ve expected (and hoped for), as Aja offers up an impressively brutal final third that injects the proceedings with some much-needed energy and effectively compensates for the lackluster nature of everything preceding it – which ultimately cements Piranha‘s place as a mildly watchable B-movie effort that could have (and should have) been so much better.

**1/2 out of ****