K-SCORE: 36
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Writer: Anthony Jaswinski
“We’re not dealing with a shark.”
Starring: Blake Lively
Spoiler Level: Moderate
The Shallows reveals quite a bit of untold content that was not but should have been depicted in the film Deep Blue Sea. I liked it, but let me be clear about a few things. We’re not dealing with a shark. We’re dealing with a genetically engineered killing object resembling a shark, a gekoras, if you will. A shark can’t do things like eat an entire buoy and it won’t do things like torment a bikini-clad girl for days on end even well after it’s had more than enough to eat. Sharks also have a pretty good sense of where the bottom of the ocean is and why it’s best to avoid sharp objects. Not the case for this beast. This beast lives for the hunt. He wants to instill fear in his opponent, and he watched a few episodes of Gossip Girl and he hated it. Now Lively’s got to pay.
The unintentional comedy for this film would have been really high just with the unpredictable and distinctly nonanimalistic behavior of the antagonist, but it goes through the roof because the tone is so serious. Someone named Jaswinski thought he had a thematic masterpiece when he wrote this thing, tossing a needless spit narrative in and a backstory about a mother that died of cancer that had a special connection to the beach where this girl irresponsibly travels alone to surf. Jaswinski was wrong and it’s hilarious. The backstory is cliche. Part of the setup is in the secret name of the beach, which is never revealed at the end, as if the filmmakers forgot that they filmed all that stuff in the beginning. There’s a weird amount of attention paid to the contents of the girl’s backpack on the beach as if the items she has are going to become relevant later and then they don’t. Chekhov’s sunscreen never matters. A bird named Steven Seagull gets a lot of narrative attention. The directing is equally spotty, but at least that guy didn’t think he was making The Shawshark Redemption. He just wanted to take a lot of pretty pictures of Blake Lively in a bikini and a shark in the water at the same time and he accidentally bought a film camera instead of a photo camera. Thankfully he slows things down so often that a good chunk of the movie is essentially still-frame shots, and, admittedly at least one of those is pretty cool. Tough to claim quality though when your story follows one goddamn character and yet you have repeated continuity errors, unexplained time jumps, shots that don’t associate with their previous or following shots correctly, inconsistent sizes of rocks, buoys, and animals, inexplicable subtitles displaying the time, date, and hours to high and low tide, eye-aching displays of text messages and video chats, and sound direction on par with what a fifth grader would do if he borrowed his Dad’s Macbook and started fiddling with Final Cut Pro. There are little heartbeats inserted into the moments that are supposed to be tense.
So this movie is great. Let me correct that. This is a movie… that I watched. I laughed throughout. I wasn’t bored despite them slowing everything down to a sub-real-life pace, and having no non-seagull characters that I found interesting. The gekoras and the girl make some incredibly bold choices that I myself would not have made. At one point the creature gets lit on fire because it swims through oil and I think the writer’s explanation for why there was oil in the water at all was that it leaked out of the whale carcass nearby. Amazing. Really there are only a couple things holding this movie back. For one, Samuel L. Jackson did not make an end-credit scene cameo reprising his role as Russell Franklin. And because of it’s second failure I’m docking a huge chunk from its K-Score: at no point does the shark bite the girl’s bikini top off. What? Why do you think I threw this on? Bikini girl fights shark. Know your audience! We didn’t sign up to watch something philosophical and deep; we signed up to watch The Shallows.