Ok, so I'm giving THE SHALLOWS a 6 out of 10, but its a solid 6.9!
THE SHALLOWS, starring Blake Lively, is a 90-minute that has a plot so thin, you can fit it on two pages if it were a comic book. A young woman, Nancy, arrives to a secluded, yet gorgeous, beach in the middle of nowhere (I'm assuming its supposed to be somewhere in Mexico. I'm basing this on the accent of those speaking Spanish), she's trying to get over her mother losing a battle to cancer, and so visits the same beach her mother visited while she was pregnant with Nancy. She gets on a surfboard, goes out into the water, and then has a terrible time getting out of the water because of a vicious shark. The film is then, in my opinion, a metaphor for Nancy dealing with the heartbreak of losing her mother. The vicious shark IS the heartbreak. That's it. That's the whole story.
The cinematography is beautiful and it captures the beauty of the secluded location. They integrate footage from one other character's GoPro (although I do have a problem with that footage. On screen it shows that its shot using the Wide option but the image distortion, or lack of, doesn't match).
The shark itself is superbly done. Other than a couple of shots where the CGI is obvious, the effects are top-notch considering the budget of only $17-million.
Blake Lively is great as always.
So why such a low score? A couple of things:
1) I was completely taken out of the story from the opening when Nancy is using her iPhone to videochat. She's in the middle of nowhere and there's no way in hell she has that great of cell service. I live in Los Angeles and can't watch a YouTube video without buffering here and there. This was enough to pull me out of the story and made me pick up my phone to tweet about this issue.
2) The film simply was not enough to keep me engaged. Even though it has a running time of only 90-minutes, it dragged. I kept looking at my phone to check how much of the 90-minutes I had already watched. Doesn't matter how great everything is in the movie, if it doesn't keep me engaged, then it didn't do its job.
Bottomline, THE SHALLOWS is definitely worth watching. Will it merit repeated viewings? Not for me. Maybe for others. Its worth checking out at least once, though. You may have a much better time watching this than me. If it had flowed a bit better, it would have kept me engaged and it could've possibly ended up with a high 7.
