Holy titties! This movie is amazing. Check your pretension at the door, strap on your 3D glasses and get ready to have a hilarious, bloody good time. Imagine spring break in Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Thousands of tanned, half-naked college kids and lots of drinking, dancing, beer bongs and wet t-shirt contests. Introduce a lake full of 2 million year old blood-thirsty piranhas and you have yourself a recipe for entertainment. Jerry O'Connell stars as Derrick Jones, a Joe Francis “Girls Gone Wild” type producer on a mission to exploit and entertain.
He hires good boy local, Jake (Steven R. McQueen) as a location scout. Jake has spent most of his summer babysitting for his younger sister and brother, and hesitantly welcomes the opportunity to add some partying to the mix. Jake's single mom, Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue), heads the local sheriff’s department with Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames) and spends her days busting frat boy balls until a fisherman's mysterious death unveils an underwater terror of epic proportions. Forester and Fallon enlist the help of local fish specialist (played so good/badly by Christopher Lloyd that he's definitely getting a Razzie) and embark on a mission to get all the spring-breakers out of the water before they succumb to the Paleolithic piranhas.
Do the college kids listen? Of course not! My only complaint about this movie is that the first 40 minutes didn't have enough blood. I was just getting ready to protest the lack of death, when director Alexandre Aja and his team of hundreds of stuntmen and graphics experts (check the marathon credits) delivered. Hoards of spring-breakers struggle like flesh-dripping bloody zombie mobs trying to get out of the water. And by the dozens, they met their brutally gory, gratuitously nude deaths.
Have you ever been surrounded by frat boys and thought, “Good Lord, if only a razor-toothed evil piranha would bite his steroid-enhanced pecks off!" Well now you can see it. And then you can see them devour piles of peroxide blondes with implants. I found myself cheering for every character to be mowed down by these vicious biting fish. Those seismologist divers flown in to help? They're gonna get eaten by piranhas! Angelic blond children? Yes! Eat them too! I'm not saying I didn't care about the characters in this movie...Okay, I didn't care about the characters in this movie. I just wanted everyone to go! And most of them did.
Almost every annoying character is taken care of. And it feels good. Forrester and team put up their best fight against their aquatic foes. Forrester actually tasered a piranha at one point and Deputy Fallon, well lets just say he should get an award for best and only heroic death. The pundits will say what they will about Piranha 3D. Was this movie stupid? Hell yes! Was there a time the script turned into a porno (i.e. "I want to be the first to explore this underground lake. Oh my god, this is the longest one I've ever seen. I'm entering the cave now…")? Yes, there was. But it wasn't irritating. It was funny. I laughed out loud through most of this movie. And then there were more crotch and boob shots, nudity, tequila and 3D vomit. And the way Jones meets his death...I'll leave that for you to enjoy.
This movie does not take itself seriously. And neither should you. Just go see it already.
