Review of The Shallows (2016) by Z M — 26 Oct 2016

The Shallows, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, stars the beautiful actress Blake Lively in yet another cliche shark movie. The movie brings to a table a new and funky format projecting what Lively's character, Nancy, is looking at. For example, when shes video chatting with her little sister and father, you can see her phone screen projected right now; how cool is that!? The movie is filled with the brim with action don't get me wrong, the suspense leading up to the final fight was in no doubt executed perfectly and grand finale was no upset either. However, the movie overused a lot of effects such as slow motion and the amount cliches took away from the experience, they got annoying and predictable real quick.

The Shallows tells the story of a dropout medicinal college student in search of the surfing beach where her mother was pregnant with her. She meets up with two fishy (pun intended) surfer dudes who she slowly eases into. After they head out she comes across a dead whale that has a gigantic bite taken out of it. That is where she is confronted with a greeting by the behemoth, a great white shark in search of blood. After taking major hit by the beast, she finds herself on cornered on a rock in a race against time. With the tide coming in, she has to act quick because wrong decision could be her last.

Blake Lively stars as the only character with significance in this film. It was very interesting move by Collet-Serra centering the movie around her and her struggles and hardships between the shark. Lively does a superb job at keeping the action at a high level. She was the obvious choice for this role as does a great job at portraying Nancy as the happy go lucky, surfer girl from Texas.

This film does a clever job at really utilizing the title of The Shallows and the slogan, "What was once in the deep is now in the shallows." They put a gigantic, serial killer shark into a such a shallow area of water, which really gave off that jaws feel. No one expects such a beast to be in ten feet of water like that, which really helps fuel the nightmares and fear of going into the ocean after watching this. Even though they completely overused slow motion, in some scenes, it really help send shivers down my spine because you got see in full extent what Nancy was going up against. The nightmarish music also helped set the tone for the film; whenever you started to hear you got ready for this 20 foot monster to come flying out of the water. But what made this even better was how they would cue the music but lead it to nothing so you really had no idea when the shark was coming to attack, causing my heart to briefly stop at some points.

If you're an adrenaline film junky who's in need for a quick fix, I would recommend this movie to you. But if you're looking for a movie with an original plot and likeable characters, just stay home and spend your pennies elsewhere because the amount cliches in this were excruciating to sit through. It does a great job at keeping the action level at 100% but If I were to rate the originality of its plot, I would give it one grade higher than that of a decent movie on the Sci-Fi channel (So basically an average plot with really no substance). My final statement on this movie is that its amount of action saved it from being a flop.