Piranha 3-D
Metascore
53 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 20 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 10 out of 20
  3. Negative: 2 out of 20
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  1. Tampa Bay Times
    Reviewed by: Steve Persall
    100
    Hands down and body parts floating, the most irresistibly sick movie in years is Piranha 3D, which should be retitled Piranha 3D, Double-D and C for all the topless cuties director Alexandre Aja feeds the fish and audience.
  2. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Tirdad Derakhshani
    88
    What really matters is that the film works. It's a genuinely suspenseful, no-holds-barred masterpiece of sex 'n' horror exploitation.
  3. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Joshua Rothkopf
    80
    Roger Corman could only dream of producing a movie this stupefyingly gory and loaded with exposed flesh, making the updated Piranha that most unlikely of remakes-an improvement.
  4. Movieline
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    75
    There's a degree of gruff integrity at work for at least two-thirds of Alexandre Aja's grindhouse piranhapalooza Piranha 3D, in which a megaschool of man-eating fish thought to be extinct burst through an underwater fissure to terrorize a normally placid lake in Arizona.
  5. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Michael Rechtshaffen
    70
    A pitch-perfect, guilty-pleasure serving of late-summer schlock that handily nails the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the Roger Corman original.
  6. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Chuck Wilson
    70
    Irredeemable, and yet, the movie, written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is too funny and the filmmaking too self-aware to be truly offensive.
  7. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    67
    I call Piranha 3D ''exploitation,'' rather than a quality scare movie, because it serves up well-timed gross-outs instead of genuine suspense and because the movie has no pretense of providing character, plot, acting, or dialogue that's anything more than boilerplate.
  8. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    63
    Piranha 3D ends the summer on a note of shamelessly entertaining B movie bottomfeeding.
  9. Empire
    Reviewed by: Kim Newman
    60
    Remember the film you hoped "Snakes On A Plane" would be – this is it! By any sane cinematic standards, meretricious trash … but thrown at you with such good-humoured glee that it's hard to resist. It's a bumper-sticker of a movie: honk if you love tits and gore! Honk honk honk.
  10. Boxoffice Magazine
    Reviewed by: Amy Nicholson
    60
    The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we've lost track of the difference.
  11. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Joshua Katzman
    60
    Moderately entertaining popcorn thriller.
  12. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    50
    Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!
  13. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    50
    Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.
  14. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Betsy Sharkey
    50
    Piranha 3D is trying so hard for the laughs and the allusions amid all the gore, and endless bloodbath of bare naked ladies, that it completely forgets to frighten anyone.
  15. Variety
    Reviewed by: Peter Debruge
    50
    The 32-year-old carnivorous fish franchise has lost none of its bite, serving up a fresh batch of spring-break revelers for the fearsome creatures to attack.
  16. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Nathan Rabin
    42
    Piranha 3D realizes its guilty-pleasure camp potential for about a minute and a half, proving yet again that there's no concept so foolproof filmmakers can't screw it up.
  17. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    40
    There are few real scares, though, and even fewer actual laughs. Despite several obvious gags, Aja never captures the spoofy fun of the 1978 original.
  18. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    40
    The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.
  19. Orlando Sentinel
    Reviewed by: Roger Moore
    38
    It's not as scary as it needs to be or as clever as it thinks it is, but the new 3D version of "Piranha" is at least as gimmicky as those fabled 3D films of yore. With all the pointless 3D cartoons and joyless 3D ""Clash of the Titans" conversions, at last here's a picture that tosses its cookies, its coffee cups and its D-cups right in your lap.
  20. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    25
    The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
5.7 out of 10

Mixed or average reviews- based on 182 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 44 out of 73
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 73
  3. Negative: 23 out of 73
  1. grandpajoe6191
    5
    "Piranha 3-D" is your average bloody-gore fest boobs-n-blood movie that only those who enjoy it will greatly appreciate.
  2. feardrinker
    3
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. This is not a horror film, it is exploitation. Although I'm a fan of 70's and 80's exploitation films, I didn't much care for this one. The various characters are either obnoxious or cardboard placeholders (or both), to begin with, and I could hardly wait for the killing to start. The teen angst/romance subplot was rote and meaningless. Part of what makes the old exploitation movies likeable is a low-budget, unpolished but earnest charm that is missing in this one. And fully the first half of the movie is a plotless "MTV Spring Break" dance party.

    The many, many ways in which people are mutilated in this movie are reminiscent of the still-young torture porn genre more than horror (or black comedy, which some people will insist this movie is). The gratuitous nudity would be funny (and perhaps even titillating) if it were brief and frequent; instead we get long, lingering shots that cause the sort of audience embarrassment that Showgirls once did. These long, lingering shots also refute the argument that the movie is somehow a feminist statement against pornography; this is pornography, if soft core. It really comes down to this: if you think that watching a topless woman's legless torso being dragged up from the lake while you are invited to ogle the corpse's sizable breasts is good entertainment, you'll probably like this movie. Yes, I know some of you will.    … Full Review »
  3. Shiira
    9
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Kelly goes wild, just not wild enough to get herself killed, or rather, punished by the filmmaker. The "good girl" may down a jigger of tequila, lick salt off the bare skin of a bad girl, then suck face and suck lime like a pro, but the good girl, despite her trampy conduct, does keep her top on. This is how we know she'll survive the Grand Guignol spectacle of the "Saving Private Ryan"/"The Real Cancun" mash-up that turns out to have a surprisingly feminist bent. Don't be distracted by all the blood and breasts, and more importantly, don't make snap judgements about the film's graphic violence and liberal dose of nudity; don't be fooled. The filmmaker has bigger fish to fry. This is hardly an empty-minded exploitation movie about the worst spring break ever. "Piranha 3D" serves as a critique on pornography; it shows how pornography works. Jerry O'Connell plays Derrick Jones, a soft-core pornographer(clearly modeled after Joe Francis of "Girls Gone Wild" infamy) who preys on young nubiles with the hope of getting them drunk, then naked, for his "movies". Against Jake's protestations, Kelly gets on his yacht, where she performs for the camera, but not until Derrick needles her a bit. When the piranhas go wild, the filmmaker makes a salient point about pornography's function, as bare-breasted women are literally turned into meat, slashed and severed, for the instant gratification of the fish(read: pornography's consumers). Initially, the nudity is pleasurable(great faces, great racks), since by all appearances, it's the women's choice to be nude, but when the violence starts to intervene on sex's behalf, the film suggests that appearances can be deceiving. After all, it's usually a man who holds the camera. As it turns out, the prehistoric fish are not old enough to spawn, so when Derrick's detached genitalia becomes fish food that one of the baby piranhas spits out, the filmmaker demonstrates the relationship between pornography and kids, who just aren't ready for D-cups, and C-cups, and etc. etc. etc. Ultimately, "Piranha 3D" indicts the audience, indicts them on the charge of being hypocrites for cheering on Derrick's appropriate manner of demise, since porn is a ten-billion dollar business. Pornography keeps the world spinning.… Full Review »
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