If you pay to see this movie called Piranha 3D, and you somehow sense you're not having as much fun as you should be, blame economies of scale. Back in 1978, drive-in audiences paid to see a movie called Piranha, and they were surprised to get a fast, funny Jaws rip-off with some left-field movie in-jokes, better-than-expected dialogue and characters, and a zany let's-put-on-a-show sense of its budget shortcomings. But those little extras stood out in a shoebox-budgeted movie you paid $3 to see and expected less from — whereas a ticket to Piranha 3D (budget: $24 million) costs a whopping $14.50 and must satisfy all the expectations that entails. It's the difference between staying at a Red Roof Inn and finding a mint on your pillow, and staying at the Doubletree and looking for your cookie.
Piranha 3D's director, Alexandre Aja, is suited to everything that's wrong with the project: the man who introduced the chainsaw to French cinema (in Haute Tension) makes polished, super-splattery genre movies that are undone rather than upgraded by their glossy production values. But Aja wisely shoots for the schlocky good cheer of Joe Dante's original, using the same basic "plot" about mutant fish chowing down on vacationers, and his shamelessness gets funnier as T&A vies with blood and guts for the bug-eyed attention of the 3-D process. (He directs as if the third dimension were boobs.) The actors, including Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames and Adam Scott, are momentary distractions from a catalogue of 21st century stereopticon slides — detached eyeball, bobbling dick, a nude porn-star water ballet — and from the nagging feeling you're watching Snakes on a Plane with fish on a boat.
