Jai Courtney and His Baby Sharks Kill It, But 'Dangerous Animals' Stinks

The formula seems, above the surface, an indestructible one. A serial killer who murders his beautiful young prey not with knives or sleeping bags bashed into trees, but with sharks! It’s the perfect Summer Movie Trash event of the season on the basis of that log-line alone—be to Jaws what Wolf Creek was to Crocodile Dundee. No notes! I’m already in love.

Then on top of that, you add a deliciously unhinged character actor who’s been trapped inside a leading hunk’s body for too long as your main maniac—hello, Jai Courtney. And then you snag the director of one of the new millennium’s greatest unsung Aussie horror flicks—that’d be Sean Byrne of 2009’s masterpiece The Loved Ones. Suddenly, Dangerous Animals wasn’t just whispering sweet nothings in my direction. It was standing outside my bedroom window with a boom-box and the mellifluous sounds of Peter Gabriel filling the breeze.

And yet! Alas and alack. Somewhere, somebody got their snares all tangled, because it turns out that Dangerous Animals is D.O.A., a smelly chum of watery disappointment. Nobody wants to be a Sharknado-level laughing stock—and spare me talk of “irony” because that shit was just shit. But save a few saving graces (most having to do with Jai Courtney’s performance, thankfully a true hoot), Byrne never manages to balance the pulpiness of his premise with the Ham & Velveeta of its presentation. After a terrific opening scene Dangerous Animals almost immediately sinks—spilling its guts on the floor, we spend the remaining time watching everybody slip around in them. Purely put, it stinks.

Nevertheless, we persist. Courtney plays Tucker (or in his parlance, “TUCKAH!”) a smiling and sun-in stereotype whose rusty rundown tugboat parked down at the far end of a nondescript pier promises adventurous tourists a swim with the big fishes. We first meet him as he happens upon two such folk standing outside his boat’s door—there’s Canadian dude-bro Greg (Liam Grenke) and sweet British girly Heather (Ella Newton), the latter of whom blushes and gets real giggly as she makes sure big strapping Tucker knows she and Greg aren’t a couple, immediately speaking my language and cementing her place in my heart.

Unfortunately for Heather (and for all of us who took a liking to her), while Tucker might have big sturdy forearms that you just want to be swept up into and sparkling green eyes that make even the most beautiful sea turn to sewage in contrast, he’s also a deranged psychopath. No spoiler there since that’s the movie we signed up for! And so this little whirlwind sea-fare goes sideways real fast, and as we smash cut to the film’s title card, dark red blood having already been copiously spilled across these lapping waves of azure, we settle in to our popcorn and Raisinets for what seems like it will be one hell of a fun picture.

Let me reiterate myself: alas and alack. Enter Zephyr (Hassie Harrison of Yellowstone fame). And no offense to any Zephyrs out there in the real world who might be reading this review, but for the purposes of storytelling, your name is a big blinking warning sign that a screenwriter has gotten high off their own supply, in the bad way. Don’t you feel like you can write the character of “Zephyr” in this context without me even having to tell you anything? What if I told you she’s a no-nonsense surfer chick; a supermodel gorgeous American free spirit who’s been hurt in the past so keeps to herself, traversing these foreign shoals of the Southern Hemisphere in a beat-up van that’s both her wheels and her home all in one? Would “Zephyr” alone have clued you into any of that? Because I feel like I just regurgitated what it says next to “Zephyr” in the dictionary, personally.

So we meet Zephyr as she in turn meet-cutes Moses (Josh Heuston from Dune: Prophecy) at a local convenience store, although I feel as if I defiled the word “cute” in this instance since the spectacle of nauseating heterosexuality on display between these two for the next thirty minutes or so of Dangerous Animals tears “cute” disastrously asunder. Cute found dead in its wake! Harrison and Heuston are chiseled and gorgeous and like two wet sticks being rubbed together, generating the antithesis of “spark” — their conversations about CCR and Spirituality are I believe what the kids are calling “cringe.”

Whither Heather? Can’t we go back to adorable Ella Newton from the opening scene, I cry? At least Tucker swerves violently back into the narrative just as I’m about to heave my cookies over its side. Toss these two to the bull sharks, my big burly sea-captain friend, and let’s have us a real adventure, toot toot, beep beep.

It’s sadly not to be, though, as someone seems to have wrongly decided along the route of this film’s making that Zephyr and Moses are main characters and not the Platonian ideals of fish food. Dangerous Animals is barely ninety minutes long with credits, and so it morphs fairly quickly into a cat-and-mouse (or rather “shark and marlin” as we’ll have laboriously explained to us in one of the script’s several attempts at murdering metaphor in its crib) game. Tucker chases these two about the same fifty square feet of space and yet somehow always tripping over the trigger when the time comes to just pull, dammit, pull. Rinse, repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

For what it’s worth, Jai works magic with weak sauce, brightening up every evil-eyed bit of savagery with a goofy lil’ line-read or a shimmy of his hips. He deserves far better nemeses. The scales are just too lopsided in his favor for a movie that seems to have no clue of that—we’re out here rooting for Tucker to obliterate these soggy slabs of cardboard in a spectacular shark-infested bloodbath fashion, while Byrne & Co keep insinuating we’re supposed to be in the tank for these dreary young sops. We ain’t!

The frustration becomes poisonous as Zephyr and Moses, moon-eyed doofi who should stick to hair-care commercials, keep getting rescued by deus ex machina as deep as the Mariana Trench; all while Tucker flits about being the sort of freak-weirdo I could actually come to love. Indeed to entertain myself as the movie wasn’t I began forcing a queer reading onto things—like how Tucker shows no interest in the ladies, but then as soon as marble-abbed Moses is onboard his boat he immediately gets stripped down to next to nothing? Oh, I see you, Tucker. Come let us hunt down the banal straights of the world, toss them overboard like so much chum, and leave a rainbow shimmer on the surface of the sea in our wake! Happy Pride Month 2025, everybody!