Review: 'The Devil's Mouth' Is a Really Bad Movie

I like a good, fun, stupid shark movie. Unfortunately, Prime Video’s The Devil’s Mouth is neither good, nor fun, nor even stupid enough to warrant the click. Some movies are fun-bad. This one is exhausting-bad.

The oldest of Gen Z turns 29 this year, the exact age of the film’s two stars, Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor, both best known for high-school roles (Newton in Freaky, The Society and as Paul Rudd’s daughter in the Ant-Man movies, and Condor in the To All the Boys flicks). In The Devil’s Mouth, they’re playing post-grads on vacation with a handful of disposable friends in Thailand, all on the cusp of a big decision: move to New York or Los Angeles. That they have the whole world ahead of them is the only character development they’re afforded before they’re dropped into a system of caves following a huge storm that washed a lot of ocean life into the freshwater.

Most of those ocean creatures died, but not a bull shark, which apparently has the ability to survive in freshwater. Too bad for Charlie (Newton), Kate (Condor), and their friends, who get picked off one by one by some bad CGI. There’s really not much to it: a lot of swimming, some climbing, and a whole lot of screaming. It’s an uninspired PG-13 affair, so there’s little joy even in watching the shark periodically mute those screams. It just goes and goes until all that’s left is the slightly less annoying of the two stars. There’s no tension. There are no good jump scares. It comes on with eight characters, and an hour and 45 minutes later, it ends with one.

There’s a cynical calculus at work in the casting, too. Newton and Condor are both charming performers who’ve aged out of the ingénue roles that made them, and pairing them here feels like a bet that two second-tier draws might add up to one B-lister — they tried to do the same thing by pairing Condor with Maddie Ziegler in the only marginally better Pretty Lethal. It doesn’t work. If anything, the math runs the other way - two actors who deserve better, stranded in a movie that gives neither of them anything to do but tread water and shriek. It all just makes me miss when bad shark movies — Deep Blue Sea, The Shallows — were actually fun. This one is worse than bad; it’s boring.