Wishing for Kate instead of Blake
With the right actress, a movie like The Shallows could be rigged for success
The other day, I bolted out of work eager to see a woman about a shark. And that woman hadn’t carried a movie in a while. So I ran, saying, “Kate Hudson, here I come!”
Please don’t ask me to explain. I just like Kate Hudson. At her best, she’s got a hardened, embarrassmentproof way of carrying her share of witless romantic comedies ( Something Borrowed), semi-racist bayou horror ( The Skeleton Key) and the worst movie I’ve ever seen ( Bride Wars). She’s not an air-freshener star that way. The movie stinks, regardless of what she’s doing in it. And, to her credit, she’s not there to make friends. Usually, she’s come to win.
And for every sucker like me who thinks that she, Matthew McConaughey and the rest of that dumb, yachty caper Fool’s Gold actually hold up eight years later, there are 10 people who think that title pretty much sums up the Hudson experience. I feel bad for those people.
But, as it turns out, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the movie about Kate Hudson and the shark because, less than four minutes into The Shallows, I realized that Kate Hudson wasn’t in it. Really, it’s worse than that. It’s a Kate Hudson movie that actually stars Blake Lively. Who knows how this happened? Out of the corner of my eye, I probably caught an ad, saw that it starred a blond and just had a Fool’s Gold attack. But you know that moment when you realize that you’ve made a horrible, nontrivial mistake — like leaving your wallet in a cab, or showing up a week too soon for a destination wedding? I was that guy at The Shallows: excited to see a movie that doesn’t exist and seated too far into the middle of the row to do anything about it. So I stayed.
The first scene introduces Lively’s co-star, a shark rampaging in Mexican waters. The second scene introduces Lively, as a vacationing American surfer (Nancy Adams from Galveston!), getting a ride from a local stranger who either ignores her or changes the subject anytime she asks the name of the remote, obviously deadly spot they’re headed toward. (To be honest, I don’t think I could bring myself to say “Jaws Beach,” either.)
Anyway, he drops her off; she slips on her strategically only partway-zipped wet suit and heads into the water. Yada yada yada: the shark attacks, and she and her maimed thigh are stranded on a dead whale, then a buoy rusty enough to leave you itching for a tetanus shot.
With the right star, this sort of “stuck out here all alone” thriller is a gift from movie studio heaven: Man, I hope Sandra Bullock figures out that Russian space-shuttle manual so she can get back to Earth. But with the wrong star, it’s like reading that manual. And Lively is a Russian-manual sort of star.
Her performance as a junkie in The Town features the Bride Wars of Boston accents.
Her performance in The Age of Adaline — as a woman “cursed” to stay 30 forever — was like watching a mermaid ride a bike. She tries. But her acting hasn’t yet caught up to her algorithm-generated beauty.
There might be no appreciable industrial difference between what a Kate Hudson can do versus your Blake Livelys. I don’t think they’re interchangeable, but sometimes the movies beg to differ and the market corrects itself.
Don’t fall in love with Mark Harmon, because here comes Kevin Costner. And sell your Brad Rowe stock, because he’s just going to be replaced by Brad Pitt. (In the late 1990s, that pretty much happened.) But there are continuums, too. Channing Tatum, for instance, is a more elastic, hip-hop-era Brendan Fraser upgrade.
Lots of parts that have gone to Lively feel as if Hudson could have played them. But something happened and suddenly it was someone else’s turn to be “it.” And part of what annoys me about the lack of Kate Hudson in my life and the surfeit of Lively is the same thing that makes me angry when a perfectly good piece of software gets a superfluous update, or a zealous waiter takes my plate at a restaurant: I wasn’t done with that.
Lots of people are fine with seeing Lively in something called The Shallows. At the end of June, it was America’s fourth-most-popular movie, continuing the year of good fortune for her and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, another actor who struggled to find his lane as a star, settling for “disfigured comic-book hero” in the surprise winter blockbuster Deadpool.
And yet, I have to believe that some of those Shallows tickets were sold to people who’d never seen a movie like this and assumed the shark was going to win. I feel bad for those people, too.
Laziness kept me in my seat. So did the possibility that the movie might make a Psycho- like switch and have Nancy’s useless friend — who looks like a brunette Blake and is only seen on Nancy’s phone — take over the second half.
But Todd Haynes didn’t direct The Shallows. Jaume Collet-Serra did and he knows his way around decent junk. He made a couple of those “stop taking my stuff” movies that Liam Neeson does: Run All Night and the magnificently bonkers NonStop.
So Lively also gets to explore her inner Neeson — maybe even her inner Sigourney Weaver, Tom Hanks in Cast Away and, with that self-surgery, Rambo. Even if she can’t act, she also can’t lose. And that’s the thing about the “stuck out here all alone” genre: anybody can do it.
A movie like this, if it’s written even semi-competently, can be rigged for triumph. Unlike Hudson, Lively seems to need to be liked. She’s up against an enemy that refuses to settle for snacking on that whale carcass and has to keep coming after her. And you don’t begrudge the will to survive, even if it’s just to keep surfing. So when Lively makes thinking faces to devise a way back to the beach and delivers a sassed-up “uhuh,” it feels almost inhuman not to at least grip your armrest, at least a little.
I still wish Kate Hudson were in this movie. What can I say? I wanted Fool’s Gold. But I didn’t mind getting plain old pyrite, either.