A review of Chum has put Alice Eve at the center of the film’s one clear compliment, calling her the lone saving grace in a shark horror movie otherwise dismissed as clumsy, flat and hard to care about. The verdict lands with extra force because the film is now out in the modern release calendar, where it is being measured against newer entries in a genre that rarely gets the benefit of the doubt.
That is the immediate reason viewers are searching for Alice Eve now: she is the one name attached to the only praise in a broadly negative assessment. The film is described as feeling like one of those shark movies that crawled out of the direct-to-video section of the 1990s and somehow found its way into today’s lineup, complete with hokey dialogue, questionable decisions and continuity errors.
What lifts Eve above the rest, at least in the reviewer’s eyes, is the sense that she understands she is operating on an entirely different level than the material around her. The performance is framed as the only part of Chum that seems to have any urgency or personality, while the cast around her makes it incredibly difficult to stay invested. Even the film’s look is part of the problem, with cinematography described as pale and flat rather than suspenseful or sharp.
The contrast gets sharper when Chum is placed beside other recent or remembered genre titles. It fares poorly next to Dangerous Animals, released in 2025, and it is said to fall well short of the chaotic fun that helped make Sharknado in 2013 and The Room in 2003 endure as cult reference points. In other words, it does not even fail in an especially entertaining way.
That matters because shark movies already battle a public image as disposable entertainment, and Chum is presented as a film that does nothing to improve that reputation. The one thing the review is willing to rescue is Eve’s performance, and that makes her the story’s only real takeaway: if the film has any afterlife at all, it will be because one actor appeared to know the assignment while the rest of the movie did not.
