Lively fight
STAR VS. DEADLY SHARK IN THRILLER ‘SHALLOWS’
Nancy Adams, a medical school dropout played by Blake Lively, is in a terrible fix in “The Shallows,” a terrible movie that should be a lot more fun than it is. Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra has shown he knows how to manipulate moviegoers with three Grade A thrillers:
The 2014 enclosed-space “Non-Stop,” pitting Liam Neeson on a plane with a terrorist; 2011's Berlin-set “Unknown,” with Neeson and Diane Kruger as a couple whose identities remain in flux until literally the final blast; and the disturbingly creepy “Orphan” (2009), in which Vera Farmiga adopts a 9-year-old girl who isn't at all what she seems.
Collet-Serra has demonstrated that reason doesn't have to be paramount for a wild ride. But we've got to believe.
But beyond Lively's hard work, not much here makes sense.
“The Shallows” begins as Nancy is driven through the Mexican jungle by a local to a “secret beach” — a surfers' paradise untouched by crowds.
In the car Nancy helpfully if awkwardly fills us in on her history — she's been abandoned by her girlfriend who has a hangover and now won't meet her (but how, we wonder, could she have met her if she didn't know where the “secret beach” is?).
Nancy reveals the beach has a personal resonance with her late mother. On a face-to-face call home on her mobile, there's Nancy's adoring younger sister and estranged dad.
Alone on the sand, she avoids two local surfers, the only other people around. When they leave at dusk, Nancy spots a dead whale's floating carcass and quickly becomes the desired dinner of the great white shark that presumably killed it.
She escapes but slices her thigh badly on coral and sits on a tiny rock formation just above the water where an injured seagull settles beside her.
As “Shallows” proceeds, it's Nancy versus the great white, which picks off anyone else who ventures into the vicinity.
Unlike a gory R-rated horror movie, this PG-13 “thriller” keeps its kills quietly off-screen, a mistake.
As contrivances mount, day passing into night into day, Nancy remains resolute. Sooner than later, we realize it's the shark that better watch out.
(“The Shallows’” most intense scenes involve selfsurgery on a bloody gash.)