Chum (2026) Review

Well, pack it up, folks. It’s been a fun 130-odd years, but now, film is officially dying, and a crappy shark flick called Chum signed its death certificate. I’ve been a film critic for fifteen years, and enjoying the medium for twice as long, and in that time, I have seen movies I’ve hated: ones that were annoying, vapid, poorly made, lazy or pushed questionable messages. But never have I been so angered to my core as I was today by Chum. Here is an 85-minute piece of audio-visual material (I don’t even want to dignify it with the label of ‘movie’) that is so heavily and blatantly AI-generated that if I hadn’t come across one or two of the actors before, I’d think they weren’t even real people. Hell, it is so poor in technical quality that I’m not unconvinced all the actors did was sign off on having their likeness put through ChatGPT and collect a paycheck. Its consistent awfulness makes it better suited to a feature-length roasting by YouTubers than a traditional written review, because I don’t have the time or the inclination to list its many faults. But suffice it to say, the very existence of Chum is an insult to the art of filmmaking, and the many talented people who built it up to what it was before it started being forcibly inbred by trash like this.

Chum opens with a stupid voice-over indicative of a product that takes itself too seriously. A guy’s wife is eaten by a shark, and he rambles nonsensically about how the ocean never forgets and how he is just a man and he doesn’t forget or whatever. This really sets the tone: two people may be credited as writers, but I refuse to believe they did more than come up with basic prompts and crank them through the machine. Here they probably asked, “Come up with a sad backstory for why a man would hunt down a shark, and write him a monologue.” If you thought the revenge aspect of Jaws: The Revenge – or any aspect of that movie, actually – was dumb, I guarantee you will be pining for its charming stupidity by the 30-minute mark of Chum. Here, some guy rescues a group of friends from a burning catamaran, but it turns out that he has nefarious plans for them. He’s going to use them as bait to lure out the very same shark that killed his wife five years earlier, and then use his evidently non-existent harpooning skills to fail miserably at exacting revenge.

There’s your basic plot, and it’s dumb, but it’s actually astounding just how badly it all hangs together. It kind of feels like a dream in the way that nothing makes sense, nobody acts even remotely like a real person, continuity has left the building and things directly contradict what we have previously seen or been told. A guy claims they haven’t seen land in hours, but there is a visible shoreline right behind them; a woman’s friends are murdered one by one by a crazed captain, and in response she keeps posing seductively like she’s in a lingerie ad; lines of dialogue don’t correspond with what was said immediately before. If nothing else, I guess it’s encouraging to know that the robots haven’t quite reached a level of believable human sophistication yet. Chum has an uncanny feeling of immaturity about it, as if young teenagers decided to write a script based entirely on the cliches that they have seen adults enact in proper movies, and then found inexperienced child actors in grown-up bodies to perform it. Anyone who has been watching movies for long enough knows what a bad or below-average actor looks like, but this is actually inhuman. Alice Eve is a real actor who has been in real films, and yet here she acts like she’s been lobotomised. Her co-stars leave even more to be desired.

So what of the bread and butter of Chum? What of the shark itself? Well, yeah, the shark action is among the best of it, because it is entirely AI-generated. The movement of the camera in correspondence with the animal, and the generally realistic look of it just smacks you in the face with its laziness. Why would you want to pay a hardworking CGI animator to do what they have worked years to get good at, or God forbid build an animatronic, when you could just get AI to do it for you? Hell, why pay anyone to do anything when humanity has worked hard enough, and now all you have to do is tell a piece of software what you want, and it will make you a shitty cocktail mixed from a million parts of actual, real, man-made material collected in a soulless bank? Not only is the film not entertaining or exciting or engaging in any way, but it truly embodies everything that is wrong with 2026 and the direction that mankind is moving in.

I know that raging hyperbole is often considered one of the standard tools in the arsenal of a film critic, but this time I am deadly serious. Chum has made me feel genuinely sad and worried for what is becoming of art. It pisses all over the graves of real artists’ careers, and then has the absolute nerve to tack on some sanctimonious message about how big corporations aren’t doing enough to tackle climate change, when the rampant use of AI is actively causing environmental harm. In the last few years, I have seen the lives and livelihoods of people in the creative industries being destroyed by the rise of AI. I’ve been subject to it myself. And when all you want is to earn a living doing what you love, it is truly heartbreaking.

My heart breaks for the talented SFX artists who should have received a paycheck from Chum, for the writers who could have made it a coherent story. Please, do not give Chum or any product like it a minute of your time, or a cent of your money. Support real art from real artists, and make it known that this is not acceptable. Shame on you, Jonathan Zuck, for putting your name as a director to something so artistically bankrupt. Shame on you, Film Malta, for funding such an empty product. You are all meant to be champions of creativity and the human essence of the arts, yet here you are, participating in its demise.

Movie Rating:

Chum trailer