Review: THE SHALLOWS

New killer shark flick is a bloody, fun ride.

Any movie involving sharks is basically a license to print money. Moviegoers’ fascinations with sharks started over forty years ago now with JAWS, the original summer blockbuster. Since then we’ve had three JAWS sequels, two OPEN WATERs, DEEP BLUE SEA, TINTORERA, MAKO: THE JAWS OF DEATH, GREAT WHITE, three (!) SHARKNADOs, MEGA SHARK, SAND SHARKS, SWAMP SHARK, GHOST SHARK, SNOW SHARKS, RAGING SHARKS, JURASSIC SHARK, SUPER SHARK, SHARKTOPUS, DINOSHARK, and I’m just exhausted thinking about the rest. They’ve attacked spring break, Malibu, Venice, and Japan. These aquatic assholes even have a whole week devoted to them on the Discovery Channel that people flock to with the same religious fervor most reserve for their favorite sports teams. They’re the top of the food chain when it comes to cinematic predators, with bears following in a pitiful second place. After all this carnage, what do sharks have left to prove?

This latest entry to the canon of killer shark flicks, THE SHALLOWS, suggests that they don’t really have to. A taut, cleverly mounted survival thriller, THE SHALLOWS comes with some great set pieces, choice scares, a healthy dose of humor, and it’s all devoid of any sort of pretension. It’s a killer shark movie that just wants to be the best killer shark movie it can be. You like killer shark movies? You’ll get a good one. Burnt out on these slashers of the sea (who in reality take a lot of riling up to get that pissed off)? You’ll still get an entertaining 87 minute ride.

The film belongs more or less to Blake Lively, playing Nancy, a med-school burnout who travels to Mexico to find a gorgeous, secluded beach her recently deceased mother spoke of fondly. Ditched by her best friend who got too drunk the night before, Nancy goes on a solo surfing trip. There are a couple other people around, but enjoying the solitude, she goes out to try and catch one last wave before headed back to the hotel as everyone else packs it in for the day. But when she gets too close to a particularly hungry shark’s dinner – an enormous, rotting whale carcass – the oceanic predator starts looking at her like she’s a side dish. Bitten and losing a lot of blood, she manages to secure higher ground on a rock, but she only has until the tide rolls in to get out of there in one piece.

Lively makes for a particularly strong, likable, and empathetic heroine. Writer Anthony Jaswinski (VANISHING ON 7^TH STREET, KRISTY) gives the actress just enough backstory to work with. As a performer and a character, Lively lets the audience in on how ridiculous and sometimes implausible her situation is. There’s a great physicality to the performance. Most of the time, she’s reacting to things that either aren’t there, aren’t acknowledging her, or that the audience can’t see, and it’s her job to keep the viewer invested in what’s happening. It’s a survival thriller that in many ways recalls what her husband, Ryan Reynolds, had to do in the underrated one-hander thriller BURIED, only her character here goes through arguably worse hell than being buried alive.

THE SHALLOWS finds itself a perfect director in hit-or-miss Spanish born genre maven Jaume Collet-Serra (ORPHAN, HOUSE OF WAX 2K5, NON-STOP), who mounts some clever set pieces and sets up a bunch of props that Nancy will have to utilize to get out of her predicament. He’s smart enough to make sure that the circling shark isn’t Nancy’s only problem. She’s about to go into shock. If she goes in the water, the jellyfish and stinging coral are just as unpleasant. What little technology she has isn’t particularly reliable. The locals who happen upon the beach and fellow surfers are even less effective. In typical survival movie fashion, Nancy has to use her wits to survive and occasionally hope for some strokes of luck. Serra doesn’t try to make things more outlandish than they need to be, outside of including a helpful, also injured seagull buddy for Nancy to interact with. If anything, that seagull steals the entire film. If there’s any miscalculation here on Serra’s part is that at some points the viewer will feel more visceral fear for the well being of this seagull than they might for Nancy’s plight. At any rate, Serra knows the perfect terror-to-character ratio here.

Serra also doesn’t shy away from the gore here. I’m kind of baffled as to how this got a PG-13 rating. I’m assuming that a big part would be the film’s lack of nudity, which is admittedly strange since anyone in Nancy’s situation would automatically assume that their bikini top or bottom would make a better, easier tourniquet for a gaping leg wound than ripping a wetsuit into strips with one’s teeth. There’s a lengthy, painful sequence where Nancy attempts to sew her leg up with what she has on hand. To reference WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY, there’s a pretty bad case of someone getting cut in half. The body count is much higher than I would have expected going in. There’s a well place F-bomb at just the right time. I guess it’s just enough to skirt an R-rating, but don’t take that as an open endorsement to take the little ones to see it unless you expressly want to give them nightmare fuel.

THE SHALLOWS builds to a kind of convenient, crowd pleasing, ludicrous conclusion that might leave some viewers scratching their heads if they don’t immediately remember that whale blubber is flammable. It’s all rather silly, but it knows it’s silly. It’s just another shark movie, but by those standards, it’s definitely higher on the curve than most JAWS pretenders. There’s also, refreshingly, a pointed, resolute ending. Here’s hoping the shark doesn’t develop the capacity for revenge and follows Nancy’s family ten years from now.