How much do you like your dad? Would you be willing to lose an arm or a leg for your dad? How about wrestling with alligators to save your idiot dad who got trapped in a crawl space beneath a house as a hurricane is about to flood the place? That's the premise in Sam Raimi's "Crawl" (2019), where characters make some strange choices that lead to a whole lot of tension, fair jumpscares and limbs getting torn off left and right.
Haley is the second-best swimmer in her team. All she misses is her divorced deadbeat dad, who won't respond to any phone calls as a hurricane is approaching. She bypasses the road blockade and rushes in to find his dog at the new house. "DAD!" she calls to no avail. She rushes to his old house and crawls beneath it. There, she finds her dad.
First of all, the idea of an American who owns a dog leaving it behind as a hurricane approaches seems absolutely impossible to me. People would sooner leave their kids than their dogs. As soon as Haley saw the dog, she – you guessed it right – took it with her. Without Haley finding the dog and then the dog barking at the entrance to the crawl space in the second house, the plot would be dead in the water. All right, so why did Haley's dad crawl underneath the house in the first place?
I carefully listened to what Haley's dad (I believe he's named "Bobby") would put up as an excuse for being down there. He says, "To board some vents". The plot excuse is that he wanted to sell the house but couldn't find a buyer except that he could but then he couldn't sign the papers to finalize the deal so he decided to board some vents to increase the value of the house. I'm not asking for a legally bulletproof plot, just give me something that's not completely ridiculous.
If Bobby had said, "I got blackout drunk and somehow woke up here," that would have been a perfectly plausible explanation that's also in line with his character – straggly idiot moping loser who can't keep his life under control. The plot should always be moved by characters acting as they're established.
As you might expect from a Sam Raimi movie, there's dismemberment, in this case caused by alligator(s) who crawled underneath the house. The CGI is OK but the beasts are portrayed as pretty much being hyper-aggressive reptile assassins who can go invisible, shrink their bodies to fit anywhere and move at lightning speed. I didn't find it even remotely plausible that they would hunt with such coordination in such tight spaces. Haley gets bone-crushing injuries several times but still has peak athletic performance for no reason other than Plot Armor.
There are other implausible plot points, such as Haley finding a gun. She actually moves from the crawl space towards some sort of an underground lagoon (??), where she finds a corpse with a gun (???) that she uses to kill one alligator assassin from the inside of its mouth as it jumps out just as she takes the gun to grab and swallow her entire forearm, which emerges with only minor scratches (??????). Looks cool but makes absolutely no sense. A fair bit later, she's grabbed by another assassin by the shoulder and grabs a flare to singe its eye. Again, looks cool but makes no sense and she again emerges with almost no injuries.
The devastation was very cool and the set must have been thoroughly thrashed by the end of filming. There's what appears to be actual debris floating around and though the background is obnoxiously CGI, the feel of a couple survivors trying to climb to safer ground over kitchen sinks, floating desks and flotsam as the water level rises felt very real and exciting.
I had only minor gripes with the movie, such as introducing disposable characters that get offed literally 15 seconds after. I guess there must have been a certain body count set before the filming so the movie keeps its pedigree of being a horror but there's a lot more in there than just senseless carnage. Crawl (2019) could have just as easily been a powerful drama, as it creates an interesting, relatable hero. If you can ignore the retardation of the dad character, the movie is an enjoyable, fun experience with a few fair jumpscares.