The Shallows
Ready? Here we go…
I took the bait.
I had a few hours to kill and a gift card burning a
hole in my pocket so I went and caught the latest Shark film- “the
Shallows” over at the Maya Cinema. It had some decent buzz surrounding
it and I happen to like these types of films.
So the card when through and I dropped two fins off the total. I
grabbed a bucket of popped corn and a cup of soda, I took my seat in
what I thought would be an empty auditorium- but alas, others were soon
to join me in my Thursday screening. The film started
to roll and we were already off and swimming.
So here’s the story- a woman (played by Blake
Lively) is on a journey of “self discovery” after the passing of her
mother due to cancer. We get a bit of lazy exposition drop early in the
film- she’s a med student who just dropped out, she’s
been on this journey for some time, and she has a younger sister that
she helped raise. We learn all of this in the first ten minutes of the
film and- actually, it’s all done quite well for what it is. This is who
she is, this is what brought her to this largely
abandoned beach, now let’s get on with the film and the direction
handles this information very well considering my usual distaste for
this type of writing. Suffice to say that we know everything we need to
know about this woman in the first few minutes of
the film and then the action moves on from there. And I was hooked!
What’s the action? Well, she’s out surfing in the
breakers of this small beach when she is attacked by a shark. She
manages to make it to a small island in the shallows, but the tide is
going to wipe this island out eventually so she needs
to either wait for a rescue or somehow outsmart the ultimate eating
machine. It’s basic and there aren’t many frills to complicate the
issue- and it’s really good. You might say it never flounders! Lively is
an engaging actress and I can’t help but draw a
little comparison to her real life husband and his performance in
“Buried”- (Ryan Reynolds, trapped in a coffin the entire film.). She
isn’t an actress I’m overly familiar with- I haven’t seen much of her
work. But she is completely engaging in this film and
she carries a strong lead throughout the piece. She spends the majority
of the film trapped on a coral reef and vacillates between playing the
helpless damsel and the fighting woman her parents raised her to be. And
this is where that back story comes into
play- because we see the journey she is on and the decisions she is
making, why she is making them, and where they will ultimately lead her
to. So while I groaned inwardly at the start of the film, the whole of
it made sense of everything much later- and the
film eventually asks the question: “How much do you want to survive?”
4 out of 5.
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