The Shallows (2016)

I was pretty stoked for a new shark movie - I mean a serious one. For all the fears and traditions that Jaws began back in 1975, there have been relatively few proper shark movies since. Even Deep Blue Sea - about the only other blockbuster to spring to mind - wasn't really a serious shark movie. To be honest, I'm not sure The Shallows is either. It's a lot sillier than I anticipated a 2016 shark movie to be, and I'm still not quite sure how bad I think it is.

Nancy (Blake Lively) has dropped out of med school, has a strained relationship with her family and a dead mother, and is in Mexico to surf on some mysterious beach. She and the few other people in the vicinity get set upon by one big fucker of a shark, and somehow, she turns out to be the only one who avoids dying. But not through lack of trying!

A few hundred yards out there is a cluster of rocks that appear when the tide is low, and Nancy ends up stranded on them, with a bite on her leg that looks as though she got off really lightly when we see just how big her assailant is. Here she spends the next 24 hours or so doing very little. But she does make friends with a seagull who is also stranded because of a dislocated wing, who she names Stephen. I kid you not, I rooted for him more than for any of the humans in this entire picture.

At first it seems as though Nancy is waiting on the rock for low tide when she might have the easiest chance of getting back to shore with all her limbs intact. But low tide comes and goes and she has done nothing to end her predicament. I got to wondering what she was waiting for. Surely for an avid surfer such as herself, she has at least a marginally better chance of survival by swimming for it than waiting to die of exposure. But she hangs around for whatever reason, and when the camera helmet of her recently-masticated acquaintance washes up near her rock, she makes more effort than she has shown yet to retrieve it, apparently under the impression that the shark is out at the shops or something.

The many inconsistencies in the narrative make for critic fodder, from the small cluster of rocks supposedly being a safe retreat until the script calls for the shark to bellyflop the thing like a gym mat in the finale, to Nancy's attempt to eat live crabs rather than make a run for it. It's all the small things with this one. But the narrative itself - in the most literal sense - was what pissed me off about The Shallows. There is such heavy use of lazy narrative features, I suppose intended to help guide we idiotic viewers through this complex web of events. Nancy talks to herself constantly in a very unnatural way, I suppose intended to reflect on her dealings with patients as a medical student. But it is so stiff and expositional that I felt patronised.

Means of killing a big ass shark in open water without any real knowhow or equipment is a point that has perplexed shark movie makers for sometime, and they never get any more serious or believable! This one involves being pulled down to the sea floor by the weight of a chain that has been broken from the buoy it anchored, luring the shark at such speed as to impale it on the shards of the anchor, dodging it herself at the very last second. And all without decompression/regard for respiration. But the final image of the shark, its anterior smashed in like the crumple zone of a Volvo estate on the motor way, was fairly amusing, so I'll give the makers a little credit.

You won't feel robbed of ninety minutes of your life by watching The Shallows, and the first act has some fairly decent suspense, but it is a silly and inconsistent movie, topped off with a 'family reunion' theme so cheesy it shouldn't be approached by the lactose intolerant. But if you tune in for any reason, it should be to witness your own emotional turmoil when Nancy sets Steven Seagull adrift on a shard of surfboard. I said to myself, If Steven Seagull comes to any harm, I am SO done with this punkass movie! He is the unsung hero of The Shallows, and my new favourite actor.