To meet audience expectations — better still, to fully satisfy those expectations, a good filmmaker comes to terms with the fact that their primary job is to understand and appreciate the storytelling target they’ve been charged with hitting. Whatever the genre is, the smart director doesn’t aim too high with hubristic reinvention or too low with intelligence-insulting reliance on cliché. This is how genre masterpieces are built; an achievement that will never earn you a spot on some lofty Top Whatever of All Time list, but can win you something even better: immortality on various cable channels and within the movie-loving heart of your audience.
Speaking as someone who wouldn’t give up his lifetime season tickets to the hoi polloi cheap seats for anything, “Road House” is a masterpiece. So is “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Death Wish 2,” “Caddyshack,” and many others that don’t involve old men lamenting love and loss and the meaningless of both in poetic black and white. And with that in mind, I hereby declare “Piranha 3D” the first bona fide masterpiece of 2010. Alexandre Aja, the director responsible for the superb 2006 remake of Wes Craven’s own horror masterpiece, “The Hills Have Eyes,” not only hits a bulls-eye in the genre of horror/exploitation, he splits the arrow that hit the bulls-eye.
Every year, the quaint resort community of Lake Victoria, Arizona, is overrun by wet and wild college kids looking to get laid and to get their Spring Break drink on. Sheriff Julie Forester (Elizabeth Shue) is an old hand at keeping the peace without ruining anyone’s good time and until the grotesquely chewed-upon corpse of a local pops up (literally) her policing is pretty much limited to writing tickets and handling drunks. That her floater was found near the epicenter of a recent earthquake is no accident. The quake opened a massive underground cave that for millions of years served as home for a breed of deadly piranha assumed extinct. Now that the deadly fish are loose, much is expected of Sheriff Julie … and director Aja.
Oh, and how both deliver.
Though surrounded by bikini’d nymphs thirty years her junior, the 47 year-old Shue is still by far the hottest thing on screen – babysitter hot – even in uniform, and an excellent stand-in for the everyman competence of Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody in what is just one of the film’s many reverential references to “Jaws.” From the audaciously confident opening cameo to a recreation of one of the most famous focus pulls in all of movie-dom, the spirit of Spielberg hangs over everything — and you sense his approval.
The real miracle of this sumblimely entertaining and unpretentious grinder is not just how it completely holds your attention for every second of its 89 minutes, but that it never stops peaking. At each delicious stop along the way to a superbly executed and deliciously gory Big Attack, you keep saying to yourself “It can’t get better than this.” And then it does. Even after that opening cameo, even after the nude underwater ballet (there are more boobs in “Piranha 3D” than at Politico headquarters), Christopher Lloyd’s wonderful Doc Brown turn as Dr. Exposition, and Jerry O’Connell’s ruthlessly energetic (and libelous?) skewering of “Girls Gone Wild” scumbag Joe Francis.
As a hater of all things 3D, even that works here. You will dodge vomit and regurgitated penis.
Need I say more?
***UPDATE: A reader points out that I declared “Toy Story 3” a 2010 masterpiece. So technically that makes “Piranha 3D” the second masterpiece of 2010, but a masterpiece nonetheless … and you would think I would remember my own writing better than someone named JJSmith10.
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