The Shallows

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra/Starring: Blake Lively, Brett Cullen, Oscar Jaenada and Sedona Legge

Director Jaume Collet-Serra's track record has been less than inspiring the last decade. With several Liam Neeson action films (groan) and a mediocre horror film (Orphan) in his resume, you'd might expect his next directorial effort to be more of the same. But with his new film The Shallows, we enjoy a respite from his characteristic clunkers to have a bit of fun. Don't mistake my post for a gushing rave. Though his film defied my low expectations, it is very much like its title. It is shallow, often silly and its characters have fewer dimensions than the savage shark who menaces the heroine therein. But if you relax your mind and set your thought controls to cruise, you'll find the movie to be an enjoyable trifle.

Blake Lively (needing desperately to atone for Age of Adaline), plays Nancy; a young woman in her mid-twenties on holiday in Mexico. Her surfing getaway has a purpose, for she hopes to find the remote, inaccessible-to-tourists beach her mother once visited. The film tells us Nancy's backstory efficiently and economically with her brief phone call to her father (Brett Cullen), who asks why she is surfing when she should be in medical school. We also learn of her mother in a series of iPhone photos she looks upon wistfully. One picture shows her mother in her carefree youth, the next with a head-covering, which clues us into her cancerous demise. So we know Nancy's journey to the beach is a sort of pilgrimage which imparts a sentimental dimension to her vacation and the film.

The backstory behind us, the story forges ahead. Why does Nancy's guide Carlos (Oscar Jaenada) offer ominous advice about surfing the beach when she asks its name? He doesn't divulge it but drives off in his jeep, leaving Nancy to her surfing.

Collet-Serra takes time to show us blue waters and the thrills of surfing as Nancy and two young Mexican men hit the waves. The men are amiable and nonthreatening as they leave Nancy to herself though she ignores their advice about quitting at the end of the day.

Floating about on her surfboard, Nancy begins to sense something isn't right. Of course we know what's coming when she is attacked by a Great White shark, which bites into her thigh. Terror-stricken and bleeding, Nancy manages to swim to safety, which happens to be on the floating carcass of a whale. Her medical training comes in handy when she tends to bleeding leg. She manages a crude suture (the squeamish can turn their heads), then shreds part of her wet suit to slip over her injured leg, which tests her capacity for pain.

But her safety proves to be ephemeral, for the angry shark--yes, he's angry--begins ramming the whale's dead body, causing Nancy to fall into the water. Desperate, she manages to swim to a rock outcropping, which she barely reaches. Knowing her safety on the rock is guaranteed until high-tide, Nancy is aware her next perilous swim may be for a relatively distant buoy. Nancy rests on the rock while keeping tabs on the shark fin that pokes menacingly from the water's surface. Her only company is a wounded seagull whose wing is dislocated.

No need to go further into narrative detail for the story plays out the way one would expect a battle between a sexy blonde star and a Great White might. A few people get munched trying to help Nancy and a few failed attempts at hailing a passing ship leave her at the mercy of the vindictive shark. Incidentally, Nancy eventually learns why the shark is so pissed--apparently he suffers the wound inflicted upon him by someone or something and is out to even the score. I guess the shark has a backstory too.

The fact that the film had a screenwriter shocked me. Someone had to write this? You mean they didn't make this up as they went along? All you need is the premise: blonde, American babe squares off against killer shark during a surf excursion. The rest writes itself, que no?

Nevertheless, the movie is still fun. Lively manages to express excruciating pain and fear quite well and of course looks amazing doing it in her alluring bikini. The shark looks quite real and convincingly vengeful.

Just as The Exorcist is a film many horror flicks must pay a toll to, Jaws is the shark thriller to which others of this sub-genre must genuflect before. Though Collet-Serra understands its mythic stature, he mostly ignores it. You have to respect his artistic impertinence.

The film has its logical slips; Nancy doesn't seem to be troubled by a lack of potable water and one may wonder why the shark doesn't feast on a whale carcass instead of a bikini blonde. Some other minor puzzlers come to mind but who cares, who needs fidelity to reality when Blake Lively and a Great White are locked in inter-species combat?

I walked out of The Shallows feeling quite satisfied and hardly duped. It doesn't pretend to offer anymore than what it does: surfing, a surfing babe, vicious shark and minimal gore. For a June afternoon at the multiplex, more would be criminal.