The Shallows (2016)

My God, the movie is bad. I'll just point a few things and rest my case:

The shark in the movie is big and behaves like a human psychopath. The bit on the woman's leg does not match it's teeth. A shark of that size can chew steel cables. It's bite can tear flesh and muscles from the bone and can sever limbs. Yet the woman has only suffered a mere flesh wound.

After only a few hours, the woman is hungry enough to eat crabs and gross stuff, which make her puke. This is stupid. Hunger makes you so desperate after a few days, not hours.

Birds have frail articulations and many tiny bones in their wings. The bones are spongy and frail. It's hard to arrange a bird's articulation even for a veterinary surgeon, yet she does it like it's her hobby.

Fmovies: The Shallows (2016)

I'm guessing somewhere at some time someone said: "Hey you think Blake Lively can hold a movie on her own?" To which I imagine the response was "What sort of casting director would try that?"

Blake Lively is more than just a pretty face. The director makes sure you see her face, with the entire film being about her experience. So if she couldn't act then any audience would notice. I enjoyed her acting. She was believable and convincing that she was the character. If she can make me forget that she was Serena from Gossip Girl then that's great.

The film has problems. The shark isn't up to modern day graphics. Neither were the dolphins. Also the ending was bad. It's not how you expect it to end, which is good.

I think the bad ending it due to the writer, Anthony Jaswinski. This is his first major film and it shows.

I noticed some directorial flaws, or maybe they were intentional. Jaume Collet-Serra is good at keeping the flow of a movie going, I just wished there was better shots.

Verdict: If you're easily frightened, this film could scare you. If you're a horror movie junkie then it'll be too vanilla. Worth watching.

Steven Spielberg has a lot to answer for. Ever since he made Jaws in 1975 there have been countless attempts on the big screen to emulate that film and all have failed. Some have been excruciatingly bad but thankfully The Shallows isn't one of those. This is the story of Nancy who travels to a secluded beach to surf . While in the water , she is hunted by a great white shark and finds herself stranded on a rock with the tide going out . Wounded and with time running out she battles to get away from the shark. Probably the best thing about this film is performance of Blake Lively. She definitely carries this film. The action is pretty good although totally predictable and it looks great up until the use of CGI underwater when it starts to look like a scene from a Sharks Tale. At a pleasant running time of 84 minutes , The Shallows is good bit of escapism but like every other shark film , it's no Jaws.

The Shallows fmovies. I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, a shark becomes vengeful towards a human, no problem, an exhausted woman can ride a turbo charged chain to extreme depth, fine, mobile phone coverage on an isolated beach in Mexico, sure, they have great infrastructure.

What I absolutely cannot accept is that high tide does not follow low tide by a little over six hours. It's the same the world over and is invariable. A hot girl in a bikini can persuade me of almost anything, but not that she can change the speed the moon revolves around the earth.

To add to this marine quibble, the story tells us there's 25 minutes to high tide, but the rock she's sitting on is still two feet above the water. Now if she'd been marooned on a rock in the Bristol Channel, where there's a huge tidal range, it's just possible the rock could have been covered 25 minutes later. Of course it's pretty cold, so no bikini, and there aren't any killer sharks, so no tension.

The rest of the film is extremely silly. She should have eaten the bird.

People often underestimate or under-appreciate the ability to produce a genuinely good B-movie. There's Renny Harlin on one end of the spectrum, making crap like The Legend of Hercules, 12 Rounds, and The Covenant. But then you have someone like Jaume Collet-Serra, who knows a thing or two about framing a scene, getting good performances from his actors, and above all, making an entertaining movie.

The Shallows could have been an otherwise conventional and forgettable thriller without Collet-Serra's strong and stylish direction. For example, the scene when Blake Lively's character first gets attacked by the shark is beautifully composed - in one unbroken take, no less - and legitimately nightmarish, with the red blood slowly overtaking the blue screen. It also doesn't hurt that Lively successfully carries the entire film on her shoulders, giving what is arguably the best performance in her career to date. There's a quiet fierceness and admirability to her character that makes it easy to root for her survival.

Overall, there's a lot to like about The Shallows. It's gorgeously shot, suspenseful, emotionally gratifying, and entirely successful on what it sets out to be - a solid B-movie, and it takes skill to pull that off. Sure, it doesn't match the heights of either Gravity or The Martian, but then again, its budget is a mere fraction of what those films cost.

The Shallows knows exactly what it is, and that's the best praise I can give it. It's barely 90 minutes long, has a small cast, and only one location. Its only purpose is to give you a thrill-ride during that time; an adrenaline rush based on an ubiquitous fear among humans: being stranded in the ocean with a shark. However as the title suggests, this doesn't take place in the middle of the ocean. This woman is stranded only a couple hundred yards from the shore, close enough to potentially shout for help. What The Shallows does so well is establish this sense of isolation and hopelessness for our main character, and her situation of being so close yet so far from safety.

Blake Lively is great in this role. It's mostly a reactionary role - not much dialogue aside from some early establishing conversations to develop her character. For the majority of the film Lively is terrified and fighting for survival against a deadly shark. This thing is huge, like the Jaws' shark's father huge. And it's interesting to see how she follows its patterns and observes its behavior, allowing her to act accordingly without being trapped. There are some far-fetched scenes, sure, but Jaws had them as well and it's hailed as a classic. Now I'm not saying The Shallows is as good a movie as Jaws, because it certainly isn't. But again, the movie knows what it is, and as a short shark thriller appealing solely to our primal fear, it gets the job done and then some.

Now, it has its faults. The electronic music during the surfing scenes was immediately off-putting, and there are some slo-mo shots that definitely did not deserve to be in slo-mo. But the directing as a whole is well done - gorgeous sweeping shots of the open ocean, the slow build up before the initial attack, showing the shark only when it's most effective. The writing is clever and practical, relatable to the point that you feel for this character's predicament, and the acting as I said is top notch. The Shallows doesn't break any new ground, but it does exactly what it sets out to do - give the audience yet another reason to avoid the beach.