Movie Review: “The Shallows” pits a bikini-clad Blake Lively against a murderous Great White Shark, resulting in popcorn movie nirvana.
It’s too bad Jaume Collet-Sera wasn’t making movies in the 90’s. With no-nonsense popcorn flicks like his surprisingly swift and enjoyable trilogy with aging Irish ass-kicker Liam Neeson — the ludicrously enjoyable killer-on-a-plane flick “Non-Stop,” the sleepy “Unknown” and the crime yarn “Run All Night” — Collet-Sera has staked out a territory that was previously occupied by guys like John McTiernan and Simon West in the decades previous. These were guys who made unabashed junk cinema, and weren’t afraid to flaunt it. Movies like “Die Hard” and “Con Air,” and even Tony Scott’s underrated “The Last Boy Scout,” were big, explosive action flicks crammed with broad, but memorable characters, lots of physics-defying actions, explosions (of course) and a generous helping of silliness and good-natured, often vulgar humor to remind you that you weren’t watching Fassbinder or anything.
These days, in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s gravely serious “Batman” trilogy and flicks like Zack Snyder’s much-maligned “Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” poker-faced grimness is the new norm in blockbuster moviemaking. “The Nice Guys,” directed by former 90’s kid Shane Black, is the last film I’ve seen that came closest to that glorious vibe of the previous decade — where action movies were earnest and unassuming and seemed to know that they were action movies, and weren’t subsequently determined to twist every other passage into some kind of metaphor about God, Man and Power. Collet-Sera’s movies, though none of them have been outright great, are a refreshing throwback in this way. He’s a skilled studio director with an appealing slickness and a knack for moments of nastiness and neat reversals of sympathy that any genre maven would envy. And with “The Shallows,” the director has made what is undeniably his best film yet.
A lean, brutal survival film that pits a California surfer babe against a terrifying Great White shark, “The Shallows” is pure popcorn bliss: dumb, visceral, unreasonably enjoyable and, in its own boneheaded way, pure cinema. As far as set-ups go, it’s about as spartan as it gets: sexy California Girl comes face-to-face with nature’s most efficient killing machine and must fight with every inch of her being to stay alive. That’s it. That’s literally all the plot you get, and it’s really all the plot you need when the filmmakers are this dead-set on delivering an old-school monster picture with zero pretense and a hefty surplus of nail-biting thrills. “The Shallows,” while not exactly breaking any new ground, is just the latest example of the maxim that ‘it’s not what a movie is about, but how it’s about it’. As a pedal-to-the-medal time killer with a fine sense of visual and narrative economy and the sleek, lustrous visual style of a music video or a sexy beer commercial, “The Shallows” is a movie that more than makes good on its premise.
The star of “The Shallows” is Blake Lively, who is one of those actresses who is unfairly assessed mostly for how she looks. In fact, Ms. Lively is a tremendously gifted performer, given to subtle, off-the-cuff line readings and moments of cracked humanity that can enliven even the dreariest of enterprises. She was stunning as an alcoholic wreck of a woman with a romantic axe to grind in Ben Affleck’s crackling bank-robber flick “The Town” and she even managed to find a kernel of honest-to-goodness character in the cesspool of awfulness that was Oliver Stone’s “Savages”. She’ll be seen next in Woody Allen’s “Café Society,” opening today (I won’t be seeing it) but I can’t overstate the physicality and emotional immediacy of her performance in “The Shallows”. Call the film itself junk all you want, but let’s all acknowledge that acting in a movie like this is not easy. Lively is in practically every scene — granted, there’s about four or five characters with speaking roles in the entire thing — and she nails every moment of stark terror, in addition to selling the character’s inevitable and thrilling transition into a predatory badass. Lively is a different kind of sex symbol and her self-aware, game turn in this film is a bold rejection of Hollywood’s uneding bimbo fixation. Alert and fiercely intuitive, Ms. Lively conveys the ripples of conflict in our heroine’s face, selling herself as a genuinely compelling female protagonist with both agency and a great deal of guile and cunning.
Throughout “The Shallows,” Collet-Sera neatly (and sometimes sadistically) ratchets up the tension in each scene. Occasionally, this nerve-chafing virtuosity becomes unbearable. This is a movie where contrivance isn’t just inevitable: in a way, it’s welcome. Once you surrender to the movie’s willingly brainless vibe, logistics all but go out the window. That being said, Collet-Sera is careful to consider telling character details in advancing the plot. Not for nothing is Lively’s character a former med student, i.e. one who can stitch up a wound in a pinch.
It helps that the film itself has not an ounce of fat on it. Like a great Roger Corman movie, “The Shallows” no time for slack, improv-heavy comic digressions or declamatory third-act monologues. Lively’s continued attacks against the fearsome nautical beast who goes for most of the movie without being seen come to constitute the synapse-frying final stretch of “The Shallows”, and though there’s some lapses in plausibility that can’t really be ignored, (a righteously awesome but totally implausible moment in which Lively’s character manages to create a trail of gasoline in the water and light the shark on fire is a particularly conspicuous example) there’s something almost primally satisfying about a film that delivers such maximum velocity thrills without asking us to consider it as, y’know, meaningful.
Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that all you need to make a movie is a gun and a girl. Replace gun with “shark” and I think you’ve got the basic appeal of “The Shallows” down pat. Collet-Sera usually has a bag of tricks that he employs in each film — text bubbles used as ominous portents in “Non-Stop,” David Fincher-style “Panic Room” zooms in “Run All Night” — and here, aside from a few well-deserved flourishes of pure style, he’s wisely put that impulse in check. “The Shallows” is like riding a sugar cereal high into the loopy depths of trash movie paradise: a blast from a past when action films weren’t burdened by turgid, self-parodic pomposity. I don’t know if it’s the best shark movie since “Jaws,” as critic Dave Ehrlich famously pronounced, but I do know that it’s unquestionably the best shark movie to be released this year. Maybe just don’t head straight for the beach right after watching it. B+
