I can safely say The
Shallows is the best movie about a killer shark since Jaws, and not just because (like the Great White itself) it has
little competition.
This is going to be a brief, spoiler-free review, because I
don’t want to give too much away about the movie. It really is a simple
premise, but not in a boring way.
Blake Lively plays a surfer who goes to a secluded beach in
Mexico alone, and while out on the water, she encounters a ferocious Great
White Shark. It bites her, and she becomes stranded on a barren rock isle, only
a few hundred feet from shore.
I wasn’t sure Blake Lively could carry a movie like this,
but she does, and I really liked that her character wasn’t a helpless bimbo.
She’s actually quite smart and tough. Sure, she still does a fair amount of
screaming and hollering, but wouldn’t anyone in this sort of situation? Also, I’ll
address the obvious: seeing her in a bikini for
nearly the entire run-time was a plus.
There’s more to the plot than what I described, and I was
pleasantly surprised to find several elements not spoiled in the trailers that
came as welcome surprises, and weren’t corny but rather endearing and original.
This isn’t some mind-blowingly original premise, but it’s well executed,
despite being somewhat cliché and predictable.
It’s not a spoiler to say the shark isn’t shown much in the
first and second acts, but honestly, it didn’t really need to be. At this
point, I think just about everyone knows what a Great White looks like. The way
its presence is implied worked effectively, and the movie didn’t feature an
over-abundance of Jaws-isms, like POV
shots from below and slow, dramatic music (on that point, the music was a bit
generic, but it wasn’t distracting, either, it fit well). The shark is cgi, but
it’s definitely the best cgi shark I’ve ever seen. I don’t think there was a single
shot where the effects sucked.

I can’t say I was ever really scared at any point, but it
didn’t feel like the director was trying and failing to make the movie scary.
It was definitely suspenseful and nail-biting at points, but never truly scary—of
course that’s just for me, if you’re not a big horror fan you might enjoy this
because it isn’t a full-on bloody horror show, it’s a suspenseful, conservative
thriller.
Overall I’d definitely recommend The Shallows to fans of survival movies and/or shark movies. It’s
not a cheesy, silly time like Sharknado,
it features a character who is easy to sympathize with, and a shark that you
hope doesn’t eat her. I wouldn’t say you necessarily have to rush out to the
theater to see it, but if you’re watching Shark Week this week, it’ll make a
nice addition to your programming.
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