PLOT: A newlywed couple joins friends on a Mediterranean yacht excursion, only to find themselves caught between a predatory shark and a psychopathic killer in their midst, transforming a sun-drenched escape into a fight for survival.
REVIEW: A shark movie already comes with plenty of baggage. There’s still pretty much just the one good film in the genre, and the rest are often of the B-movie variety. So I try to go in with appropriate expectations and just have a good time. Unfortunately, there’s only so much that my brain can shut off, and I need some form of effort present. Chum decides it would rather focus on awful characters, a plot filled with holes, and AI Shark Attacks than anything approaching fun and original.
Chum follows a group of friends, as well as a pair of newlyweds who seemingly hate each other, as they get attacked by a shark and their boat goes up in flames. Thankfully, a man saves them, only to use the captives as bait, as he tries to hunt down a massive shark that took his wife. If you’re having a bit of déjà vu, there are definitely some similarities between this film and Dangerous Animals. And the trailer makes them look identical. But there’s less focus on the crazy guy, and he’s in it for revenge, not pleasure from the baiting itself. So it really stops at “crazy guy uses people as bait for shark.”
Alice Eve is really the only recognizable face amongst the cast, and she’s also the only person who seems to be putting forth some effort. The acting is terrible and reminds me of something you’d see in a SyFy Original. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so stale and awkward, but the character dynamics are simply infuriating and make it all worse. The first act shows a newlywed couple that clearly shouldn’t have gotten married, and their “friends” who don’t seem to care. It just made me immediately start rooting for the shark, as these people are insufferable.
Chum utilizes footage of real sharks, but has a hard time keeping the shark type being shown consistent. Then it mixes that real footage with some of the most insane FX I have ever witnessed. It goes from just casually mixing footage together to a moment that feels straight out of the Shark Attack franchise. The filmmakers clearly used AI for its post-production, and it makes every attack look awful. There’s a strange floaty quality to most of the victims, and they seem to just put their limbs in the shark’s mouth. It may be passable at a glance when using the real shark footage, but it goes off the rails when a shark is doing something that they don’t have archived footage for.
There are some very strange editing choices where a fairly normal moment is suddenly shown in slow motion. I lost track of the number of times that they were simply stretching for time, and we see things that we really don’t need to. Watching the full journey of a man getting onto a boat is hard to make riveting. It doesn’t help that the music goes insane anytime someone enters the water, and there’s almost immediately a shark cutaway. It makes for plenty of unintentionally funny moments, and I found myself chuckling a lot in the third act. Melodrama and terrible FX will always make for some dumb fun.
The trailer made Chum look like a more subtle shark film that uses real shark footage to give the audience some thrills. Instead, this just feels like only a couple of steps up from Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, with this weird usage of actual footage with VFX. I could see this being a fun time to make fun of with friends, but if you want something with even the slightest bit of competency, then look elsewhere. This is one of the roughest shark movies I’ve ever seen, especially for a theatrical release.
Chum is playing in theaters on June 5th, 2026.
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