Dangerous Animals was a particularly intriguing movie for me as a Jai Courtney apologist. When Hollywood was testing Courtney as a leading man, he was let down by the vehicles designed for this purpose, mainly the poorly reviewed legacy sequels A Good Day to Die Hard and Terminator Genisys. However, he has consistently shined in villain or antihero roles since then. Much ink has been spilled about 2016’s Suicide Squad, but I found his Captain Boomerang charismatic, and his compellingly unsettling role as the H๏τheaded Bob in the Netflix out-of-order heist series Kaleidoscope should have earned him much more attention.
The thing that made the killer shark movie Dangerous Animals particularly intriguing was the fact that the ravenous sharks weren’t even the core danger in the story. Courtney plays Tucker, a man who runs a cage-diving business in Queensland, Australia, and moonlights as a serial killer who feeds unsuspecting tourists to sharks. Most recently, he has kidnapped lone wolf American surfer Zephyr (Hᴀssie Harrison), whose only connection on land is her one-night stand of the previous night, Moses (Josh Heuston), whose interest in cracking her hard exterior and pursuing a romance leads him to discover that she has gone missing.
Jai Courtney Is The Standout In Dangerous Animals
Tucker Is A Charismatic And Memorable Villain
As I suspected, 2025’s Dangerous Animals is an excellent showcase for Jai Courtney’s onscreen villainy. Tucker is a character who could have been entirely flat: he isn’t given much of a background and his main function in the story is to act as a brick wall for Zephyr to throw herself against. However, Courtney imbues the serial killer with a predatory charisma that justifies how he might conceivably make a life out of duping unwitting tourists, but barely covers the fact that he is a coiled snake about to strike, which helps boost the tension of every scene he’s in.
[Tucker feels] like a demented Steve Irwin.
The scariest thing about Tucker is that he’s clearly having fun, as evidenced by the showmanship with which he delivers his victims into their watery graves, as well as the fact that he continues to deliver fun facts about aquatic creatures throughout the movie. Courtney delivers this all with a sharp-edged, manic glee that makes the character feel like a demented Steve Irwin. Primarily because of Courtney’s performance, Tucker is the only truly memorable thing about the movie.
That is not to say that Hᴀssie Harrison and Josh Heuston are doing a bad job. They have solid chemistry with one another, and both deliver entirely capable performances. However, while both stars ground their stock roles in a believable reality, neither elevates their characters to the point that they are worth thinking about for more than a few seconds after the credits roll.
Dangerous Animals Is A Little Too Generic
It Infrequently Rises Above The Most Basic Type Of Cat & Mouse Plotting
Unfortunately, beyond the cast of characters, Jai Courtney is completely surrounded by generic elements that don’t quite pull their weight. While it is interesting to see how the serial killer subgenre bumps up against the killer shark subgenre, Dangerous Animals doesn’t do very much in either sphere that hasn’t been done before dozens of times. This is especially true of the shark storyline, which is woefully thin.
Since Jaws popularized the subgenre in 1975, there have been more than 100 killer shark movies, including The Meg, Sharknado, Deep Blue Sea, and many more.
The major shark attack setpiece that is meant to establish what the stakes are for Zephyr is apathetically staged, and it completely fails to provide the live wire terror that is absolutely necessary in such a scene. Additionally, while the cat and mouse serial killer storyline has a few unexpected moments, it mostly fails to earn its position as the primary mode of the plot. It is not quite gory enough to sell Zephyr’s physical predicament, and the script has very few ideas for ways for her to make interesting use of the setting as she tries desperately to escape.
The romance storyline also fails to offer an interesting juxtaposition with the rest of the movie, because the characters are laboriously shoved into positions that make sense from a plot perspective, but don’t come organically from their established personalities. This is compounded by a third act that seems to think that merely repeating a phrase from the first act counts as bringing the story “full circle,” even though it is arbitrarily shoehorned into the dialogue in ways that frankly baffled me.
As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, Dangerous Animals does get the job done, but if it didn’t center Jai Courtney’s great serial killer performance, it would have absolutely nothing to recommend it to those who aren’t already wholly devoted to watching every single thriller that comes to theaters.
Dangerous Animals premieres in theaters on June 6.
