The fifteen minutes of exposition that open the film are blunt, but they are fast.
#INTO THE SHALLOWS FULL MOVIE MOVIE#
Director Jaume Collet-Serra understands exactly what kind of movie this is supposed to be, and sets about making the leanest and meanest version of that film. However, these flaws also speak to the strengths of The Shallows. Blake Lively is an engaging presence, but is not necessarily an actor strong enough to anchor a single-hander.
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Her quarter-life crisis is very much by the numbers, although The Shallows deserves some credit for choosing to convey a lot of the stock beats through clever visual interfaces and a smart phone slideshow… before it gets to a conveniently timed phone call in which characters repeatedly state facts known to both parties as a way to bring the audience up to speed. Nancy Adams is hardly a protagonist for the ages. None of this is particularly deep or nuanced. Crabs run up the beach as if trying to escape whatever is lurking in the surf. When Nancy is left alone on the beach by her fellow surfers, the mood visible darkens. The camera pays careful attention to all of Nancy’s supplies, as if to underscore how much she might need them. Various locals refuse to tell Nancy the name of this tropical paradise. Even in those early exposition-driven scenes, there is a sense of danger lurking at the edge of the frame. Indeed, Collet-Serra does an excellent job cultivating a sense of mounting dread. The exposition (particularly of theme) is applied with a very thick brush across the first fifteen minutes of the film, to the point where it feels like the protagonist should be expecting some sort of catastrophe to befall her based on the way the universe is aligning. The film relies an awful lot of contrivances to get its lead character into a situation where she finds herself stranded on a rock in the middle of the ocean engaged in a desperate life-and-death battle with single-minded super-predator. A lot of the usual criticisms of these sorts of movies apply to The Shallows.