Blake Lively's performance in 'The Shallows' is very engaging. The movie is basically a one-woman show. Blake gives everything she has to make her fight for survival look realistic and she really does it great. Her performance elevates the movie above the usual mediocrity one is used to seeing in these kinds of survival movies these days. She's not only easy on the eyes in her surfer outfit, but she also acts realistically and makes you feel the character's pain.
I thought it was a pretty decent and relatively realistic shark attack movie – up until the finale that is. Just before the final fight against the shark, there is an under-water scene involving glowing jellyfish, which just seems completely unrealistic and out of place to me. That scene is something for a sci-fi movie. Then there is the final fight in which the shark is killed in the most ridiculous and unrealistic way imaginable. The payoff in this otherwise decent movie is just laughable and something I would have expected seeing in a Sharknado installment or something.
It's too bad that the movie doesn't hold up until the very end, but it is still a rather decent survival movie. Watch it for Blake Lively's great performance, if nothing else.
Review by schmenkyBlockedParent2016-09-15T22:57:43Z— updated 2017-05-13T19:11:25Z
If you are a 16 year old boy or younger, you'd definitely enjoy this movie. If not, you probably won't. The director/writer combination was atrocious, and made for some truly awful decisions.
Firstly, this movie is basically an hour of watching a tall blonde's ass and boobs. The main character wears a bikini, and only a wet suit top which she literally zips up to her cleavage. Jaume Collet-Serra chose to film that shot only to show that the character makes the decision to show her cleavage. Doesn't really matter anyway since she promptly removes the wet suit for "plot reasons."
Aside from the obvious sexism which would make it impossible to watch this movie with any self respecting female, there were many other factors that destroyed the possibility for this movie to be enjoyable on a mature level.. The acting, dialogue, movie physics, and just about every plot point made the movie progressively more comical with each iteration. At one point, a shark tooth is shown, and it's huge.. pretty much the size of a Megalodon tooth. However, when the shark is shown alive with its mouth open, its teeth mysteriously appear to be normal size for the shark.
Jaume Collet-Serra must have watched Jaws when he was little, and after crapping out some high profile, cookie-cutter, action movies, he decided to trick someone into producing this pile of rotting whale carcass for him. After finishing the movie, and checking the director's information, I was stunned to see that this was not a first time director.
0 / 2 directing & technical aspect
0 / 2 story
0 / 1 acting
1 / 1 pacing
0 / 1 dialogue
1 / 1 living up to its genre
0 / 1 originality
0 / 1 lasting ability to make you think
0 / 0 miscellaneous +/- point
2 out of 10