![]() It's corny-a lot of the film is corny, often knowingly so-but damned if you don't find yourself loving that bird and worrying that it won't last through the end credits.Īfter a while you get to know Nancy's physical condition so well that you could fill out her hospital admission forms, and you become so familiar with the beach that you could draw a map noting major points of interest: the shoreline, a buoy, two outcroppings of rock, a rotting whale carcass floating farther out. Like Tom Hanks in " Cast Away," she has a non-human "buddy" to talk to: a seagull that she names Steven ( get it?). She runs and climbs, screams, cries, curses, dives into murky depths, swims through chop. Lively does a lot of her own surfing (with a double filling in during the most dangerous bits). She wears a bikini so radiantly orange that it seems to refract moonlight during night scenes, and not since the heyday of Kevin Costner in the '90s has a star's posterior been so lovingly scrutinized. There are a handful of supporting characters, most of whom end up as shark bait, but in the end, "The Shallows" is a one-woman show that puts Lively on a jagged rocky pedestal and worships her. Lively is superb here, giving one of those hyper-focused, action-lead performances that's as much an athletic feat as an aesthetic one. It revolves around questions that are spelled out so clearly by the filmmaking-much of it wordless, driven by images, sound effects and Marco Beltrami's breathless score-that when Nancy mutters "forty meters" or "I've got you figured out," it's as if the film has lost faith in its power. This is a lean, brutal movie about endurance and problem solving. ![]() There's backstory conveyed through iPhone photos and expository dialogue, and it's as necessary to our appreciation of Nancy's predicament as Dennis Weaver's internal monologues were in Steven Spielberg's breakthrough, pre-"Jaws" TV movie "Duel." I.e., it's not. Lively's character, a medical school dropout named Nancy, encounters the shark while visiting a beach in Mexico that used to be a favorite of her mother, who recently died of cancer. ![]() I'm exaggerating only a little: this slate-grey beast is as immense as the great white that took down the Orca in the first " Jaws," and it's a lot more agile, leaping into the air like a porpoise and twisting to snatch prey in hard-to-reach places. "The Shallows" is a survival thriller: woman versus nature, with nature represented most but not all of the time by a shark the size of a Winnebago.
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