Quick Synopsis: An American town is beset by twin problems: hurricanes and sharks.

Disaster movies can be intense. Nothing is scarier than nature (except maybe toilet snakes), hurricanes are destructive, fast, and cinematic. Shark movies are similar: I loved 47 Meters Down, and apparently, Jaws is quite popular. So, hurricane movies = good. Shark movies = good. Mixing the two? Well, then you get Sharknado. Usually, when a serious movie is made comedic by another film, the comedy comes later. Airplane! pretty much killed off the “Danger on a Plane” disaster movie, for example. But Sharknado was released in 2013, 13 years before Thrash. Surely the makers of Thrash knew what comparisons people would make? I’m not saying this is Sharknado, but it’s not not Sharknado. Maybe it would have worked if the film leaned into the slightly ridiculous nature, but it doesn’t. It’s more po-faced than a red teletubby.

That’s a weird way to start this review, I know. But it’s hard to find stuff to say about Thrash. There’s almost nothing of substance to it; it’s the cinematic equivalent of vape clouds. You know it’s there, but it leaves zero impression on you. It’s not that it’s a bad movie; it’s just incredibly bland. There’s not much to actively hate about it, but there’s not that much to like, either. I have some issues with the shot choices; a few scenes feature camera movements which seem to indicate they’re about to reveal something, but instead, it just shows us blank space (not the Taylor Swift song).

I love Djimon Hounsou; he’s a great actor, usually. Not so much in this, his performance feels spectacularly low-effort, almost like he can’t believe the dialogue he has to say. Matt Nable is wonderfully hateable; he does sometimes feel like he’s veering a bit too close to being over-the-top, but always pulls away before he reaches that point. Whitney Peak is probably the best performer, but even her performance feels more like she’s advertising for a bigger role than seeing this as her peak.

On the plus side, it looks real. At no point do the sharks look overly CGI, or the hurricane seem anything less than dangerous. The last film I saw that I can compare to this was probably Crawl back in 2019, and I liked this a lot more than I liked that. It’s paced well, doing a lot in a short time. The characters react logically to the situation, with the exception of characters we’re supposed to dislike, who are killed by their own hubris (and sharks, mainly sharks). Thrash has a lot of moving parts to juggle, and while some of the choices as to when to move between them are a bit weird, it mostly keeps the different narrative plates spinning well enough that none of them loses momentum.

The kills themselves could be better; I assume so, anyway. None of them sticks out as particularly memorable. Which, how do you have a movie like this and not have any memorable deaths? I assume that has something to do with the budget. Thrash feels low-budget, impressive for a low-budget disaster movie, but still low-budget. From the non-American cast (some hide their native accents better than others), all pretending to be American, through to the shark attacks, which consist of someone screaming whilst waving their arms in the air like they just don’t care.

In summary, I will forget I’ve seen this film. If I were in the room as someone else watched it, it would take me a while to remember I’ve already seen it. I watched Mortal Kombat 2 before this, but I had to get this review out of the way first because I knew, even though I made notes whilst watching it, I would have absolutely nothing to say about this if I left it any longer. I mean, in my first draft of this review, I referred to the disaster throughout this review as flooding, when it’s actually a hurricane. That alone shows how little this film stayed with me. I only remembered the water aspects, not a single moment where high winds caused issues.

That being said, I’m still looking forward to director Tommy Wirkola’s next movie, Violent Night 2.