Who would ever think to make a horror movie about a killer shark?
The Shallows may be more of a thriller/survival movie than straight-up horror, but I’m going to review it anyway. First of all, you try and keep up with one of these marathons… by next week there’s a fair chance I’ll be reviewing that Halloween episode of Disney’s “Dog with a Blog” my kids watched in the same room as me. Secondly, it is evocative of Jaws, which is for sure a horror movie. I recognize that it isn’t really fair to compare any of these movies to one of the top five greatest horror films of all time, but if the filmmakers aren’t afraid to draw that comparison, why should I be? More on that below.
Blake Lively stars as a medical student who is surfing on a secret, secluded beach in Mexico when she is attacked by a giant shark and forced onto a rock whose tip is breaching the surface of the water. She treats her wound the best she can, and attempts to wait out the shark and signal to any possible passersby to get help. Eventually, after the shark makes victims out of her few potential rescuers, she has to come up with a plan to rescue herself. The whole thing tops out at a lean 86 minutes, which is a boon for this type of story. Anything longer would have sapped the film of necessary tension and asked way too much from its lead performer. Speaking of Lively, she is pretty great here, and her performance is easily the best part of the movie. It’s always hard to assess a role like this for verisimilitude, because how the hell do you know what a “realistic” portrayal would be? Still, you can tell when an actor is off-base, and Lively remains grounded and engaging throughout what must have been a physically demanding performance.
Where the movie fails is in the writing. Lively’s character is given a shoe-horned backstory about quitting medical school after her mother’s tragic passing from cancer. I can buy that, I suppose, and I can buy her escaping to surf in Mexico as a way to outrun dealing with her emotions, but I don’t understand for the life of me how her shark encounter would alter her path or help her resolve her issues with her mom’s death. So muddy are the motivations here, I’m not even sure at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) if she has decided to go back to medical school or if she has become a surfer full time. Wikipedia tells me she has become a doctor, but that information certainly didn’t sink in when I watched it.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn’t get off the hook either. While much of the movie is beautifully shot, and the action reads very clearly, I had a problem with the shark. Here is where Jaws looms larger than it maybe should. There is zero effort put into making the shark a character in the film. Obviously, it’s not going to have dialogue, but it needs to have presence, and that is fully lacking. I think that Collet-Serra wants to leverage our cultural fear of sharks, originating from Spielberg’s masterpiece and stoked by countless hours of Shark Week footage each year, as a short cut to establishing the shark as something to fear in the context of the film. If I think about Jaws, or any monster movie worth its salt, glimpses of the antagonist are strategically eked out over the course of the proceedings. We are led to believe in false solutions to defeat the beast, but they don’t pan out, which drives the desperation even further. Whether the monster is mindless or not, it is imbued with a personality, at least in the eyes of the other characters. None of those things are true in The Shallows, which seems to take for granted that sharks are scary, and doesn’t concern itself with actually scaring us with the shark in the movie. In Jaws, when Roy Scheider has his final showdown with the shark that has (spoiler alert) just eaten Robert Shaw and half of his boat, there is a tremendous catharsis in his victory because he has seemingly defeated an elemental force of evil and nihilism. When the final showdown occurs in The Shallows (spoiler alert), and our hero emerges triumphant, it feels more like she has solved a puzzle or survived some harsh environment. We are happy that she is alive, but the fact that she killed the shark has no more effect than if she had out-swam it to the shore and got away. That feels like a huge missed opportunity for a story like this, and it’s a shame that Lively’s great performance didn’t have a great adversary to play off of.
If The Shallows feels like the type of movie you would like, you probably will. I actually liked it ok myself, despite feeling like it was a little lazy in some aspects of the production. I’m not at all familiar with Blake Lively, but she did very well in what had to be a very challenging role playing against a whole lot of green screen. I don’t think we’ve come across a modern horror classic, but it goes down pretty easy nonetheless.
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