Mermaid opens with Tom Arnold rambling his way into the movie like he just wandered on set and they decided to keep the camera rolling. It immediately sets the tone. Loose. Slightly improvised. Familiar faces everywhere. Kirk Fox. Kevin Nealon. Robert Patrick. That kind of cast where your brain keeps going “oh yeah, that guy.”
Before the title card even hits, the movie tells you exactly what it thinks it is. A “love letter to Florida.” And honestly, yeah. It absolutely is. Every sweaty frame screams Florida. Pastel colors. Sunburnt skin. That humid, washed-out sadness that only exists near the beach. The color grading is bright and vibrant like a sunny Florida afternoon, which makes everything feel even more uncomfortable when the movie starts digging into how mean and lonely it really is.
This feels like a strange pivot from Butt Boy. Same Tyler Cornack DNA, but this almost plays like his version of The Florida Project. It’s whimsical but grounded. Totally absurd but played straight. Weird stuff happens, and half the time, everyone just accepts it as normal. That worked really well in Butt Boy. Here, it mostly works, but sometimes it just sits there instead of pushing things further.
Johnny Pemberton is the highlight. He gives a full-on sad sack performance that occasionally veers into Napoleon Dynamite territory. He might be the most pathetic man ever put on screen, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s fantastic. You feel bad for him. You cringe. You want him to get a win. Then the movie reminds you that nobody here is really a good person.
Once the mermaid enters the story, it starts to feel like Lars and the Real Girl mashed together with The Shape of Water, but meaner and drier. The premise is incredible. A drug-addicted Florida man finding a wounded mermaid at rock bottom is such a strong hook. And yet, even with solid writing and a stacked cast, it never fully clicks for me.
The prosthetics and makeup are objectively well done but tonally strange. The mermaid makeup feels like something out of Face Off, and it doesn’t quite match the rest of the movie. There are some baffling choices, too. She gets fed a tiny dry fish dug out of the dirt, and suddenly her mouth is full of blood. I get that she’s injured, but the leap from almost nothing to a horror movie amount of blood just doesn’t track. It pulls you out of the moment instead of deepening it.
Robert Patrick once again proves that nobody plays a piece of shit better than Robert Patrick. His face looks like decades of sun abuse, and it works perfectly. Tyler Rice showing up again is a welcome surprise. He was great in Butt Boy, and he’s fun here too. He always brings a chaotic energy that livens things up.
The movie keeps flirting with taking things to the next level, but never fully commits. It wants to go bigger. Stranger. Meaner. It just kind of stays in neutral. At 105 minutes, it also feels about 20 minutes too long. You can feel that runtime weighing on it by the third act.
That said, the finale is pretty strong, and it does redeem itself a bit thanks to Kevin Dunn’s performance. There’s an emotional punch there that actually lands. But when the credits roll, I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt sad. Not devastated. Not moved. Just kind of bummed out.
That’s the frustrating part. I really wanted to love this. Everything is technically here. Amazing premise. Great cast. Strong performances. Thoughtful production design. And yet the whole thing never fully comes together. I had an okay time with it. I’m still a Cornack fan. I hope he bounces back hard. But for me, this one is kind of a miss.
Jessie Hobson