There’s no hiding from AI. Not even the sea.
Susan Gee Oliver reviews Jonathan Zuck’s movie, Chum.
Susan here, self-proclaimed shark movie connoisseur. As you might recall, my first rule for an animal attack movie is simple: there must be a kill before the opening credits. Good news! Chum passes the test. Barely. We get some cheesy melodramatic voice-over, shots of the fishing boat, and a generic couple. But eventually a fake blood pool and half-torso before the titles roll. It’s not a great kill, but hey—at least somebody died.
And then the fun stops there.
Chum feels like someone fed a bunch of sharksploitation movies into an AI chatbot and asked it to “make Dangerous Animals” but not as scary and make it set at a destination wedding. Don’t get me wrong, AI has a time and a place. But can you please stay away from my shark movies?
Okay, on to the plot. So we begin with a wedding and a gift from the father of the bride. Apparently the gift of a bracelet represents eternal love or something. “Never give up on love.” It’s weird. It’s ugly. And creepier…her dad seems to care about the bride waaaay more than the groom does.
After the wedding, the friends decide the best way to celebrate is to wake up the newlyweds and drag them onto a boat trip. There’s a bitchy sister, a friend who says “slay”, gratuitous drinking, and finally the obligatory line: “There’s never been a shark attack in these waters.”
Yet we wait. And wait. Twenty-five minutes into the movie, we finally see a fin.
The shark hits the boat, the captain goes overboard, and suddenly everyone discovers that there is, in fact, a shark in the water. “Did he just say shark?” Yes. He just said shark.
Then it gets really dumb. An annoying friend drops a flare into the boat and the bride falls into the water and… of course, can’t swim. But we need more drama, let’s have the boat catch on fire! Then a mysterious fisherman arrives to save the day. Or does he? Maybe the best part of the movie is that this fisherman has the aim of a stormtrooper and roughly the same success rate when it comes to killing sharks.
Chum is a strange mash-up of sharksploitation tropes that never quite figures out what kind of movie it wants to be. It borrows liberally from Dangerous Animals, throws in a wedding, sprinkles on some environmental commentary, adds a fisherman with questionable motives, and hopes the shark will hold everything together.
It doesn’t.
Chum spends too much time on characters and relationship drama and not nearly enough time doing what a shark movie should do:
Give me sharks. Give me kills. Give me ridiculousness.
AI may be everywhere now—even in the sea—but apparently it still hasn’t learned the first rule of shark movies: Stop talking. Feed someone to the shark. And maybe try a few real effects.
1.5 fins out of 5, mainly because of the cute shark.
Find Chum on digital platforms starting August 17, 2026.
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