Before this gets pretty Sharknado, The Shallows is a fairly entertaining woman-versus-beast adventure, with Blake Lively as a lone surfer who gets stranded on a slowly submerging reef while a great white shark circles in waiting. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) nicely slices up an early surfing montage with ominous underwater insert shots, and later finds a way to make figures frighteningly disappear—sometimes for a moment, sometimes for good—in the swell of a wave. The movie also has just enough of a feminist lining, including the way the plot rebuts a character’s early description of Lively as “bossy.” (If she’s going to survive, it’s because she knows how to take charge.) All in all, a good gory time—even if I could have done without the shark, somehow set on fire, leaping out of the water like an aquatic Evel Knievel.
