Movie Review : Piranha 3D

August 22, 2010 | Jitterbug 5

As a busy father of two young girls, I have very little time to go to the theater to see movies that aren’t filled with talking animals or wizards named Harry.  Most of my movie watching happens at home, in my recliner, on the big screen HDTV.  I’m normally content with this, but every so often a film comes out that I feel the need to see with a hundred other people in an uncomfortable seat after having spent too much money on candy that I didn’t even really want, all while sipping a titanic sized soda that will inevitably make me have to pee before the movie’s over.  Yay for theaters.  On August 20th, a film swam into theaters that seemed worth one of these rare excursions: Piranha 3D!

This is a B-Movie in every sense of the phrase, and the saving grace is that it knows it. The plot can be fully explained in a single, short sentence: Earthquake releases Mesolithic Piranha into a spring break lake.  Boom – there you have it.  You need to know nothing else, and every other plot detail you discover will only serve to bore you.  You won’t care about the characters or their arcs.  In fact,  your interest in the characters of Piranha 3D will be limited to only a question of their life span, which is exactly as it should be.  One of the biggest problems with the movie is that it tries to convince you the characters DO matter by spending an inordinate amount of time with them, but we’ll get into that more later.

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