‘Thrash’ (2026) Review: Shark Themed Disaster Movie Slogs Along

As a Category 5 hurricane wreaks havoc across a South Carolina town, the cast must survive the vicious sharks that come with the flood.

Thrash; Movies; Directed by Tommy Wirkola; Horror; R; 1h 26m

Boring. That was all I could think as I watched the events of the movie unfold in front of me. To my side was my mother, who had agreed to brave this fiasco of a movie with me.

I had decided to pull up Netflix with her earlier to see what we could watch to pass the time. As I scrolled Netflix’s top 10 films, I came across Thrash (2026) in 5th place. I looked at the reviews and saw it did not have good reviews, but surely it couldn’t be that bad. I was, unfortunately, wrong.

This movie was painful to sit through. The entire time it felt like nothing was happening. Between the poor CGI and the painful dialogue, I felt both bored and annoyed the entire time. Periodically I would check to see how much time was left and would be surprised to find out that only 10 minutes had passed.

The movie follows Dakota (Whitney Peak), an agoraphobic young woman, who must help a heavily pregnant woman named Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor) during the hurricane after the latter is pinned by a tree and stuck in her vehicle. The B-plot focuses on a group of foster kids, Dee, Ron, and Will (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, and Dante Ubaldi respectively), who must work together to survive the shark attacks while dealing with their abusive foster parents. Meanwhile, a news crew led by Dakaota’s uncle, Dr. Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou), learns of the severity of the storm and tries to save Dakota.

I’ll just cut to the chase: the plot is bad. It’s a bunch of meandering and nothing really seems to happen. A good third of the movie is Dakota yelling to Lisa as the latter is stuck in her car. It doesn’t help that you can’t hear what the characters say half the time due to the music and sound effects drowning them out. It also doesn’t help that I don’t care about any of these characters. The most likable one, in my opinion, is Dakota as she’s the one who has the most common sense in this movie (which isn’t saying a lot).

The writing was terrible. The beginning was just a full-on exposition dump where characters blatantly talk about their past and current happenings in the most unnatural ways. However, this poor dialogue isn’t just exclusive to the movie’s opening, it’s present throughout the entire thing. There are some really dumb lines in the movie that I’m sure the writer thought were gut busters. (They, in fact, were not.) The only gut busting thing in this movie was the poor CGI used for the sharks and the baby (when it’s not being portrayed by an obvious doll).

But the writing doesn’t just impact the dialogue, it impacts everything about the movie. The characters? Dumb as bricks. Apparently the writer thinks that city people don’t know how to deal with flooding. The physics? Nonsensical. Seriously, how are most of these characters alive?! The plot points? Absolutely absurd. At one point, a giant shark just jumps up and eats another shark that was heading for the protagonists at the end of the film.

The music was forgettable and just as boring as the movie it was a part of. At times when the sharks were shown swimming around, it felt like the generic Killer chase music from the video game Dead by Daylight (2016). The editing style is unremarkable and suddenly changes towards the end of the movie where the foster kids make a bomb to kill the sharks. It suddenly felt like I was watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010). Nothing from the past hour of the film even so much as resembled the editing style they were going for.

As for the rhetoric of the film, I would have to say it’s about perseverance and helping others. Much like how the audience must endure this movie, the characters have to brave the storm and the terrors that come with it, and they must do it together. Without the other characters’ help, many of them would have died.

However, this rhetoric feels more incidental than intentional. It feels more like it comes with the basic package of disaster survival stories rather than something the writers carefully weaved into the story. And it might be because the story doesn’t really do anything with the characters, the people who are supposed to deliver the message of the film.

A prominent example is with Dakota and Lisa. Lisa is trapped in her car and calls out for help. Dakota, despite her fear of interacting with others, goes to save her and successfully brings her inside her home, which was shown earlier to be her sanctuary of sorts. This would be something interesting to explore… if the movie didn’t just completely drop Dakota’s agoraphobia halfway through.

Another example are the foster kids. They have to survive both their terrible foster parents and the man eating sharks with nothing but each other. However, the movie just repeats the same motions over and over again: foster parents do/say something bad, the kids call it out, a shark approaches, they keep each other safe, rinse and repeat. The message starts to get lost in the monotony.

In conclusion, I want my 86 minutes back. I’m glad I wasn’t in a theater because I think being able to talk with my mom, who said the movie was “…just Sharknado with flooding,” made this film far more bearable than it would have otherwise been. All I can really say is don’t waste your time on this movie, it’s not worth it.

Rating: 3/10