The Shallows, a shark movie majorly hyped up as the next Jaws. Have you seen Jaws? 
Let me preface this review with a disclaimer: I am a shark lover and will always go to and enjoy even the worst of shark movies (Sharknado not included) but while I'll always love a good water predator film, I promise to be as fair and unbiased as I can.
Ok, The Shallows is based around a woman who goes to find a beach that her mother visited before she died. She finds it and is enjoying the view and some surfing on the great waves there. After a while and with only a few secondary characters, she gets hurt and is left on a rock.
To add to her problem, there's a giant shark circling and surrounding her. Plot made, story set in motion.
Let's get into the good stuff about this film:
Blake Lively.
Blake Lively does a great job in The Shallows, she portrays a woman who is going through a time in her life when she's running way from things at home while visiting the place her mother experienced. Her acting is the best part of the movie, her expression is fantastically shown in ever situation she faces and it's very easy to believe she's actually going through it all. For me personally, the worst part of a movie is when you can't relate or believe the main actor.
I'm not sure if Lively is a surfer outside of this feature but she definitely pulls it off, looking great while doing it. She holds your attention with her strength and carries the action on her back.
Another good spot is the story telling. The writer, Nicholas G. Carr, uses phone calls and Lively in a positive way to move the story along till the shark becomes the main focus. Carr wasn't afraid to jump right into the action while still telling a solid story.
I enjoyed his ability to put her through a lot while not jumping out of the movie's own universe. My second pet peeve in movies is when the writer creates a universe with very specific rules then they break their own rules, breaking that feeling ya get like you're in the action. Carr didn't break that cardinal rule.
And the final positive point is the time frame. There are a good amount of movies that just drag on, the story telling becomes old, a movie that should be maybe an hour and a half bores the audience for over two hours (Zach Snyder, I'm looking in your direction.)
At an hour and twenty seven minutes, The Shallows doesn't weigh you down with too much story or action that just crosses the line between it's own reality and a bunch of things just to show you shameless action (Zach Snyder, I'm looking in your direction...again...)
Aaaaand now for the negatives:
While I praised the writer for his ability to story tell, the area I feel he did us viewers a disservice is the amount of things Lively's character had to overcome. She was stuck on a small rock island with the tide rising while dealing with a deep leg injury.
That was bad enough then she has to deal with then she has to deal with the rising water, the jelly fish, the injuries from coral and the metal eating shark...it gets to be unrealistic and the fact that she gets through all of it in the way she does; it's just too much.
When she drops down in the water and seemingly goes too deep to be able to just come back up from (reminiscent of a certain scene from Jaws the Revenge...the movie that shall not be named.)
Then the other thing that was an atrocity to The Shallows was the shark: throughout the story, the shark was pretty realistic looking until that moment of it's demise. When the shark gets it, it ends up looking like a can being crushed. Not only unrealistic but just plain cheesy effects to kill this monstrous beast, terrible way to go.
For a movie that had the potential to be this generation's Jaws, it failed miserably at that. But it is one of the best in the last twenty years, not that that's saying much (Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, Sharktopus, Sand Shark and even a little further to the fourth sequel that should not exist)
This is a very enjoyable, very watchable movie and I definitely recommend seeing it with expectations of being a fun but not epic film.
Out of 22, I give this a 15. "Not a bad record for this vicinity..."
What do you think of The Shallows? Leave a comment and let me know what rating you'd give it out of 22. Thanks for reading, and a have a wonderful day.
No comments:
Post a Comment