The Shallows Review

The Shallows Review

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. 

There’s some action peppered through acts one and two, and it wasn’t overly explicit or cheesy, it felt real, and that’s perhaps my biggest praise I can give The Shallows, 90 % of it felt totally believable. There was some stuff in the third act that felt more monster-movie-ish than real-life survival drama, but I can’t knock the movie for it because it made for a satisfying climax. 

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.