DON’T GO IN THE WATER!
It’s not Jaws, but this taut thriller about the girl in a wetsuit and a shark on the loose has lots of bite
The Shallows (15) Verdict: Girl versus maneater ★★★✩✩ Pete’s Dragon (PG) Verdict: Kids’ film, with fire in its belly ★★★✩✩
HOW cruel, and how canny, to release at the height of the summer holidays a film about a woman being terrorised by a shark. Back in 1975 they at least waited until December to bring out Jaws, in this country anyway. Those of us who were impressionable teenagers at the time, and entirely immune to the forceful argument that great whites do not lurk in the Irish Sea, had a good six months to work up the courage to go back into the water.
The Spanish director of The Shallows, Jaume Collet-Serra (who has made a couple of so-so thrillers with Liam Neeson, NonStop and Run All Night), must have known that comparisons with Jaws were inevitable, and that his film would be deemed a minnow next to Steven Spielberg’s leviathan.
Nonetheless, it is for the most part a decent, well-crafted thriller, and has done impressive business at the U.S. box office.
It is also a taut 86 minutes long and cost only about the same amount as half of one leg of Manchester City’s new signing John Stones, which are two further reasons to admire it.
The film begins with an American surfer, Nancy (the gleamingly lovely Blake Lively), arriving at a remote Mexican beach. Mourning the death of her mother, she has dropped out of medical school and come to find herself. But more specifically, to find this beach, where her mother also once surfed.
So, into the waves she strides, and at this stage, with Nancy sexily pulling on a wetsuit and the camera not so much admiring as worshipping her statuesque body, we could be watching a shampoo or possibly a sun lotion commercial. After a lingering slow-mo of her on her surfboard, it seems reasonable to wonder whether Collet-Serra is calling the shots, or Saatchi & Saatchi.
But Nancy’s day is about to get a lot more challenging. When the only other two surfers leave, she stays in to ride one last wave. That’s when the great white has a quick munch of her leg, but she escapes it by hauling herself onto the carcass of a dead whale.
Respite is only temporary, however. Her next refuge is a reef barely protruding from the waves, but for how long? Meanwhile, she watches the other two surfers leave the beach, oblivious to her cries for help. Her only company is an injured sea bird which, being a plucky soul able to find reserves of wit even in the depths of despair, she names ‘Steven Seagull’.
Indeed, her pluck knows no bounds. Nancy uses her medical know-how (and her necklace) to treat her own gaping thigh wound, then starts plotting ways to outsmart the shark, while watching it feast on not one, not two, but three hapless locals.
Of course, I mustn’t reveal what happens to Nancy. But that a sin-
gle young woman can even countenance doing what it took Quint, Hooper and Brody to pull off all those years ago on amity Island, either indicates that the cinema has made great feminist strides in four decades, or that The shallows ends up getting a bit silly. Or both, perhaps.
either way, times have changed since 1975. Colletserra further distances himself from the mid-seventies, a little clunkily, by making textmessaging, FaceTime and even GoPro camera footage integral to the story.
Or maybe that was the decision of writer anthony Jaswinski, whose surname, so serendipitously that he might almost be an invention, is an anagram of ‘I sink Jaws’.
ANOTHER oft-maligned beast shares top billing in disney’s 3d remake of its own 1977 film, Pete’s Dragon. But needless to add, this is a dragon — like Puff of the magic variety — with which we are meant to fall instantly in love. Pete is a little boy and the only survivor of a road accident which kills both his parents (note to grownups; the tragedy is depicted with the utmost sensitivity).
The newly orphaned child is about to be devoured by wolves when a huge, green, and yes, magic CGI dragon comes thundering to his rescue, then raises him, Mowgli-like, in the depths of a forest somewhere in america’s Pacific north-West.
six years later, Pete (Oakes Fegley) and the dragon, which he calls elliot, are living happily together when their habitat is threatened by greedy loggers.
FORTunaTely, Pete is found by an ecofriendly forest ranger called Grace (Bryce dallas Howard), whose kindly old father (Robert Redford) has for years been telling stories about a dragon everyone, including Grace, thought fictitious.
so the story is about saving both the forest and Pete’s dragon from the loggers (and on another level, about putting Redford safely back in timber land after the rather terrible a Walk In The Woods).
It’s very nicely done, too; reminiscent in some ways both of eT and The BFG.
and never mind that elliot looks more like a hybrid of scooby-doo and the Gruffalo than any dragon you’ve ever seen, I took my twin tenyear-old nieces and they sat on the edge of their seats throughout, utterly rapt, then pronounced the film ‘really, really, really good’.
so I’ll leave you with their verdict, rather than mine.