Title – The Shallows (2016)

Director – Jaume Collet-Serra (Non-Stop)

Cast – Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Brett Cullen

Plot – Attacked and stalked by a human-hungry shark on remote foreign beach, Texan girl Nancy Adams (Lively) must fight for survival with nothing more than a rock for salvation and seagull for a friend.

“Are you ready to get wet, Dr. Adams?”

Review by Eddie on 9/09/2016

For Jordan’s take on The Shallows click HERE

Let’s be serious, everyone loves a good old fashioned shark movie.

Ever since Jaws swam onto our screens all the way back in 1977, the simple shark movie has been a guilty pleasure for movie goers everywhere.

In that time between bites we’ve laid witness to such treats as Deep Blue Sea, Open Water, the under-seen Aussie thriller The Reef and various other cinematic masterpieces like Jaws: The Revenge, The Last Shark and the daddy of them all, Sharknado. While clearly most films featuring a shark or sharks hunting down their prey are highly silly and nothing but an excuse to enact some grizzly shark led deaths, the shark sub-genre is a deserving favourite of many of us.

That is until you watch The Shallows.

A film that should rather be titled Blake Lively on a Rock or My Seagull Steven, Non-Stop director Jaume Collet-Serra’s (going backwards after his fun Run All Night) newest horror/thriller is a bizarrely well reviewed steaming pile of whale carcass that for perhaps the very first time in film history features an actor out-acted by a wounded seagull.

Filmed on the Australian Gold Coast and with a premise that seems ripe for guilty pleasure good times, Collet-Serra’s film which seems more focussed on leering shots of Lively (perhaps in realisation that her performance here is one humongous step back from the potential she showcased in The Town and to a lesser extent The Age of Adaline) and a shark that seems to have been trained by Dr. Evil himself, and but a step away from attaching a laser beam to his head in hopes on munching on Lively’s incredibly smooth looking legs instead of just feasting on an entire whale carcass at his easy disposal, is anything but a good time.

There’s barely a thrill in sight to be found here as Lively’s determined Texas surfer Nancy battles for survival on a convenient rock formation after being attacked by Jaws’ long distant and far less memorable CGI cousin, and as half chewed bodies disappear from shorelines and flare guns are shot into the water, The Shallows makes for one highly annoying and utterly stupid excuse for a film.

While the film looks good (in more ways than one) and there are limited moments of genuine intrigue, The Shallows will just make you want to watch Deep Blue Sea and will go down as one of the year’s most unjustly liked experiences, even if it did introduce the world to Steven Seagull.

1 half zipped-up rash vest out of 5