Harmful Animals was a very intriguing film for me as a Jai Courtney apologist. When Hollywood was testing Courtney as a number one man, he was let down by the autos designed for this objective, primarily the poorly reviewed legacy sequels A Good Day to Die Onerous and Terminator Genisys. Nevertheless, he has constantly shined in villain or antihero roles since then. A lot ink has been spilled about 2016’s Suicide Squad, however I discovered his Captain Boomerang charismatic, and his compellingly unsettling position because the hotheaded Bob within the Netflix out-of-order heist sequence Kaleidoscope ought to have earned him way more consideration.
The factor that made the killer shark film Harmful Animals notably intriguing was the truth that the ravenous sharks weren’t even the core hazard within the story. Courtney performs Tucker, a person who runs a cage-diving enterprise in Queensland, Australia, and moonlights as a serial killer who feeds unsuspecting vacationers to sharks. Most not too long ago, he has kidnapped lone wolf American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), whose solely connection on land is her one-night stand of the earlier evening, Moses (Josh Heuston), whose curiosity in cracking her arduous exterior and pursuing a romance leads him to find that she has gone lacking.
Jai Courtney Is The Standout In Harmful Animals
Tucker Is A Charismatic And Memorable Villain
As I suspected, 2025’s Harmful Animals is a superb showcase for Jai Courtney’s onscreen villainy. Tucker is a personality who may have been completely flat: he is not given a lot of a background and his principal operate within the story is to behave as a brick wall for Zephyr to throw herself in opposition to. Nevertheless, Courtney imbues the serial killer with a predatory charisma that justifies how he may conceivably make a life out of duping unwitting vacationers, however barely covers the truth that he’s a coiled snake about to strike, which helps increase the strain of each scene he is in.
[Tucker feels] like a demented Steve Irwin.
The scariest factor about Tucker is that he is clearly having enjoyable, as evidenced by the showmanship with which he delivers his victims into their watery graves, in addition to the truth that he continues to ship enjoyable information about aquatic creatures all through the film. Courtney delivers this all with a sharp-edged, manic glee that makes the character really feel like a demented Steve Irwin. Primarily due to Courtney’s efficiency, Tucker is the one really memorable factor concerning the film.
That isn’t to say that Hassie Harrison and Josh Heuston are doing a foul job. They’ve strong chemistry with each other, and each ship completely succesful performances. Nevertheless, whereas each stars floor their inventory roles in a plausible actuality, neither elevates their characters to the purpose that they’re value occupied with for quite a lot of seconds after the credit roll.
Harmful Animals Is A Little Too Generic
It Occasionally Rises Above The Most Fundamental Kind Of Cat & Mouse Plotting
Sadly, past the forged of characters, Jai Courtney is totally surrounded by generic components that do not fairly pull their weight. Whereas it’s fascinating to see how the serial killer subgenre bumps up in opposition to the killer shark subgenre, Harmful Animals would not do very a lot in both sphere that hasn’t been completed earlier than dozens of occasions. That is very true of the shark storyline, which is woefully skinny.
Since Jaws popularized the subgenre in 1975, there have been greater than 100 killer shark films, together with The Meg, Sharknado, Deep Blue Sea, and lots of extra.
The foremost shark assault setpiece that’s meant to ascertain what the stakes are for Zephyr is apathetically staged, and it fully fails to offer the stay wire terror that’s completely crucial in such a scene. Moreover, whereas the cat and mouse serial killer storyline has just a few surprising moments, it principally fails to earn its place as the first mode of the plot. It’s not fairly gory sufficient to promote Zephyr’s bodily predicament, and the script has only a few concepts for tactics for her to make fascinating use of the setting as she tries desperately to flee.
The romance storyline additionally fails to supply an fascinating juxtaposition with the remainder of the film, as a result of the characters are laboriously shoved into positions that make sense from a plot perspective, however do not come organically from their established personalities. That is compounded by a 3rd act that appears to assume that merely repeating a phrase from the primary act counts as bringing the story “full circle,” regardless that it’s arbitrarily shoehorned into the dialogue in ways in which frankly baffled me.
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As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, Harmful Animals does get the job completed, but when it did not heart Jai Courtney’s nice serial killer efficiency, it will have completely nothing to suggest it to those that aren’t already wholly dedicated to watching each single thriller that involves theaters.
Harmful Animals premieres in theaters on June 6.
Harmful Animals
6/10
- Launch Date
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June 6, 2025
- Runtime
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98 minutes
- Director
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Sean Byrne
- Writers
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Nick Lepard
- Producers
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Andrew Mason, Mickey Liddell, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Troy Lum, Pete Shilaimon
- Jai Courtney shines as a charismatic villain
- The film blends two thriller subgenres in a novel manner
- There’s not a lot aptitude to the cat & mouse story