Movie Review: The Shallows (2016)
What’s really the point of making a shark movie nowadays? Jaws exists, and it’s literally never going to be topped.
This movie is okay. It has some good stuff going for it, and some not so good. It’s a survival horror film that features a woman, Nancy (Blake Lively, TV’s Gossip Girl) that gets trapped by a shark after going surfing.
The movie tries in vain to create some character for Nancy before she gets stranded. She’s traveling in Mexico to the beach that her mother went to when she was pregnant with her. Her Spanish sucks, and she has trouble communicating with her driver, Carlos (Oscar Jaeneda). She’s apparently a medical student that had decided to drop out after her mother’s death.
The beach is beautiful, and she initially enjoys her surfing.
She comes out of the water to call her sister and talk to both her and her father, and then the other two surfers that were there at the beach leave. She decides to head back out there, and she finds a dead whale floating in the water. After the shark throws her from her surfboard, she takes cover on top of the whale, which seems like not a great idea.
She eventually makes it to a rock, now heavily injured. She uses her earrings to make some stitches in her gashed leg, and uses her wetsuit as a turnicut.
The shark keeps circling the rock, not letting her leave. At night, she sees a drunk guy passed out on the beach and calls for him to help her. He directs her to her phone in her backback, and the guy takes it to rob it. He then notices her surfboard, and walks out to the water I guess to steal it. This leads to him getting bitten in half by the shark.
In the day, the two surfers from the day before show up, and she tries to get them to leave the water and get help. One of them is killed, and then the one with the GoPro camera is killed while he’s trying to climb on to the rock where Nancy is.
As the high tide comes in, Nancy swims over to a nearby buoy where she finds a flare gun and tries to alert a distant ship. It doesn’t work, and eventually the shark attacks the buoy.
She gets knocked from the buoy and eventually lets the shark disconnect the chain that works as an anchor, which she rides down to the bottom of the ocean, with the shark in pursuit. The shark ends up getting impaled on a bunch of metal at the bottom, and the movie cuts to Nancy going surfing with her sister and father, after she has become a doctor.
It’s an okay movie. Blake Lively does a pretty good job in a role that requires her to be terrified for nearly 100% of the movie. The shark looks okay — not great — but it’s disappointing that they have it act like more of a monster than an animal.
The characterization seems really forced, but it’s a delicate line because you can’t have this character have literally no character. Still, it’s not great. And the scene with the drunk guy passed out is very bad.
Rating: 5/10
