Blake Lively's performance in 'The Shallows' is very engaging. The movie is basically a one-woman show. Blake gives everything she has to make her fight for survival look realistic and she really does it great. Her performance elevates the movie above the usual mediocrity one is used to seeing in these kinds of survival movies these days. She's not only easy on the eyes in her surfer outfit, but she also acts realistically and makes you feel the character's pain.

I thought it was a pretty decent and relatively realistic shark attack movie – up until the finale that is. Just before the final fight against the shark, there is an under-water scene involving glowing jellyfish, which just seems completely unrealistic and out of place to me. That scene is something for a sci-fi movie. Then there is the final fight in which the shark is killed in the most ridiculous and unrealistic way imaginable. The payoff in this otherwise decent movie is just laughable and something I would have expected seeing in a Sharknado installment or something.

It's too bad that the movie doesn't hold up until the very end, but it is still a rather decent survival movie. Watch it for Blake Lively's great performance, if nothing else.

If you are a 16 year old boy or younger, you'd definitely enjoy this movie. If not, you probably won't. The director/writer combination was atrocious, and made for some truly awful decisions.

Firstly, this movie is basically an hour of watching a tall blonde's ass and boobs. The main character wears a bikini, and only a wet suit top which she literally zips _up to_ her cleavage. Jaume Collet-Serra chose to film that shot only to show that the character makes the decision to show her cleavage. Doesn't really matter anyway since she promptly removes the wet suit for "plot reasons."

Aside from the obvious sexism which would make it impossible to watch this movie with any self respecting female, there were many other factors that destroyed the possibility for this movie to be enjoyable on a mature level.. The acting, dialogue, movie physics, and just about every plot point made the movie progressively more comical with each iteration. At one point, a shark tooth is shown, and it's huge.. pretty much the size of a Megalodon tooth. However, when the shark is shown alive with its mouth open, its teeth mysteriously appear to be normal size for the shark.

Jaume Collet-Serra must have watched Jaws when he was little, and after crapping out some high profile, cookie-cutter, action movies, he decided to trick someone into producing this pile of rotting whale carcass for him. After finishing the movie, and checking the director's information, I was stunned to see that this was not a first time director.

0 / 2 directing & technical aspect
0 / 2 story
0 / 1 acting
1 / 1 pacing
0 / 1 dialogue
1 / 1 living up to its genre
0 / 1 originality
0 / 1 lasting ability to make you think

0 / 0 miscellaneous +/- point

2 out of 10

All you should need to make a good movie is a girl and a shark, but Serra fails to deliver the basics, instead fashioning a movie that too often resembles a female oriented riff on an '80s Old Spice commercial. The Shallows is a damp squib.

Read the full review at http://www.themoviewaffler.com/2016/07/new-release-review-shallows.html

"Jaume Collet-Serra’s woman-vs-wild thriller is beautiful, bigscreen Hollywood nonsense that manoeuvres/manipulates the viewer into the kind of submissive state only the finest summer crowd-pleasers can achieve..."

Read the full review here: http://screen-space.squarespace.com/reviews/2016/8/19/the-shallows.html

**Very close to the shore, yet too far and dangerous to attempt.**

I'm sure you have seen shark attack films like 'Jaws', 'Deep Blue Sea' et cetera, and yep this another one to add to that collection. But this was something very neatly done, I mean for the most of the parts. Looked so real, so I thought it might end up top among its similar theme. In the end, I was little disappointed, because of the shark. The portrayal of shark was very natural, until the last half an hour. Then it becomes the common film gimmick when the animal was obsessed to kill its target at any cost.

I am a huge animal fan, but I have never seen a live shark in my life and that does not mean I don't know anything about them. Thanks to the nature television networks and what I saw in this film was very disappointing if you love wild animals. I am not supporting the shark here, I'm just talking about its behaviour. It was not right, other than that, I definitely enjoyed the film. In fact, except the final few minutes, since the shark got pumped up, I had no issue and the best shark attack film. But the final battle ruined overall favour I'm going to give to it, what I thought this film deserved.

Great location, and Blake Lively was unbelievably awesome. In the initial part, she was very sexy, but once the narration shifted its focus on surfing and later shark attack, everything changed. The entire film was edgy, I think very nicely written screenplay. It was a limited cast film and nearly the whole film takes place very close to the shore. A good start, neatly maintained mid part, but a below par conclusion, that's what I think about the film. Slightly missed to be a great film in the line of '127 Hours'. In fact, this looks like a sea version of that film. But I still recommend it, because it's worth.

_6.5/10_