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When it comes to watching some form of wildlife suddenly go wild and tear humans apart, it seems that virtually the entire animal kingdom has had a punt at some time or another. Sharks are a given of course, as are gators, crocs, various breeds of snakes, piranhas, barracudas, lions, tigers, bears (oh my), boars, killer whales, bats, spiders, ants and even sheep – however, one animal that hasn’t had the opportunity to test the mettle of man is the hippopotamus, which is crazy when you consider how vicious that melon crushing mouth is.
However, all that time in the wilderness has come to an end with Hungry, a movie that finally shines a marauding spotlight on just how much damage a pissed-off hippo can do. But unfortunately, while the filmmakers are busy patting themselves on the back about finding an animal that has yet to have been fully demonised by cinema, they’ve actually forgotten a few vital ingredients such as genuine fun and actual thrills.
Open wide for disappointment…
While vacationing in New Orleans, Sistine is trying to get her head around the recent events that have turned her life upside down. Not only has he mother recently been incredibly sick, but she’s also just lost her job for taking holiday leave she requested ages ago, and while she reels from this, friend Hannah decides that the best way to take her mind off of things is to take a boat trip into the Louisiana swamplands to embark on a discounted alligator-watching riverboat tour – obviously.
They arrive the next morning visibly hungover and get to meet the other people taking the tour that day, but as the say their hellos to divorced businesswoman Dionne, nurse Sally, her distracted son Mikey and her retired firefighter father Tim, tour guide Rodrigo sets off, setting an unforgettable ordeal in motion.
While following the Killer Animal Movie Manual step by step, Rodrigo leaves the established route and goes deeper into the swaps in order for a high-paying Dionne to get a snap of a huge local gator in order to score points with her kids from a failed marriage. However, rather than finding a twelve-foot gator, they find half a gator and an immense, aggressive hippo that isn’t particularly thrilled to find tourists floating around in its territory and promptly acts accordingly.
With their boat flipped five miles away from the actual route and a lethal omivore thrill-killing them one at a time, the survivors band together to try and figure out how to prolong their various existences. But as they tend to their wounded and offer up various scenarios, help may already be on the way in the form of Rodrigo’s grizzled boss, Walker, who naturally has experience hunting hippos despite them not exactly being native to the Louisiana swamps. But even if he can get to them in time, what can he do against three and a half tons of jagged toothy death? Moo Deng this ain’t.
When the sole original idea that your movie has is to induct the hippopotamus to the pantheon of killer animals, you kind of have to try and seek inspiration from other sources – and while Jaws is an obvious touchstone for any movie featuring oversized teeth (except for maybe Side By Side: The True Story Of The Osmond Family), it seems that that the go-to inspiration for Hungry is Greg McLean’s killer Croc flick, Rogue. To put it bluntly, it’s the exact same movie, with only a minimal differences beyond the species change. Both include a tour gone wrong, that sees various, expendable tourists face both the environment and a sizable bite radius once they’re stranded in the middle of a hostile wilderness. However, while McLean’s film was a stripped back survival film that efficiently took a less-is-more approach, and kept it’s scaly marauder acting like an actual animal rather than a monster, Hungry can’t manage to generate even a third of the tension despite stealing all of it’s best tricks.
Plenty of people are snatched under the water with the flick of a tooth and there’s also a feeling that director James Nunn was also hoping to squeeze in some man vs nature threads as the characters have to resort to clinging in trees to avoid the hellacious hippo. But in action, none of it feels particularly exciting, and despite the fact that the monstrous mammal is actually very well realised with solid, practical effects and above average CGI, the movie is ultimately missing the same amounts of personality that the exceedingly bland characters are. There’s a sense that The film is trying to build up a human villain in Tracey Bonner’s callous businesswoman, but it’s missing that edgy desire to go all in on the animal carnage the way that last years’ Primate did, that proved to be endearingly sadistic.
But while Ben the chimp went around peeling faces off and removing jaw bones at will, Hungry lacks both energy and imagination when visualising a hippo goring or crunching a human to death. All we mostly get is people yanked underwater at lightning speed, and while a climactic crushing finally shows a bit of violent moxie, I was incredibly disappointed about how dull the film made getting killed by a rampaging hippo actually look. It’s a weird mistake to make, especially considering that Hungry had quite an uphill battle to make when trying to remove the more fanciful versions of the animal from our heads. Be it the ballerinas from Fantasia, Gloria from Madagascar, or – yes – the viral tantrums of little Moo Deng, hippos are kind of seen as cuddly chonkers, despite having a mouth that looks a demonic, vagina complete with battle spikes, so the film really should have been going overboard to make them look extra vicious.
In fact, if I’m being extra picky, I’d like to point out that the title doesn’t actually make that much sense either. Yes, it’s riffing on that famous game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, but after numerous characters point out that the ‘potamus is vegetarian, the antagonistic animal can’t actually be that hungry. I mean, maybe you could argue that the hippo possibly hungers for either carnage or the smiting of its human foes, bit that’s not exactly the vibe I got from the Hasbro board game either…
By choosing to play things too straight and ending up as being completely derivative, not even Joaquim de Almeida’s crusty, Quint-esque hunter and some handsome Hippo effects can pull Hungry out of the complete lack of killer animal nourishment it’s guilty of.
While I would highly doubt that the hippopotamus would have become the next big killer animal on the block even if the film had been good, it’s a shame that the filmmakers couldn’t help the animal live up to its full potential. Flat, dull and utterly lacking in tension and surprise, Hungry doesn’t even have inspired deaths or cool gore to fall back on to save it sinking beneath the surface like a stone, never to resurface. More like a hippo-not-timus, if I’m being honest…
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Where to watch Hungry: