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However whether or not Jaws worked
because of our fear of the unknown or the fear of being eaten alive,
I'm pretty sure that the The Shallows simply
works because of our fear of
Jaws. The film tells
the story of a surfer girl, Blake Lively, who goes to a secret beach
and gets attacked by a shark. Because if I've learnt anything about
sharks from the only headlines that they ever appear in, surfers do
seem to be their primary food source. Luckily the girl manages to
scramble onto a really tiny island where she then spends the rest of
the movie trying to work out how to get back to the actual land in a
way that doesn't involve becoming chewed up and turned into shark
shit. Oh, and she has an injured seagull on her island to chat to that
she's nicknamed Steven Seagull. Imagine Cast Away's Wilson
and it's basically the same deal. Both the bird and the ball exist
for the main character to have somebody to talk to with the only
difference being that when you want to kick them in their obnoxious
little face you have to wait for the cameras to stop rolling for at
least one of them. I would say that this film is in the lower half of
average and yet I'm not sure I can work out what's worse.. the cringy
pun that is Steven Seagulls name or that fact that I already prefer
him as an actor over Steven fucking Seagal.
So
yeah, for the most part this movie really just riffs on Jaws.
So you get the POV shots from
the shark more than you see an actual shark, occasionally a fin will
skim the surface of the water, and whenever you do see the creature
you think, “hmm.. that looks fake as fuck”. In The Dark
Knight, Christopher Nolan often
sited the shark in Jaws as
an inspiration for The Joker. Both have no real character development
and simply swim directly through the story causing chaos whenever
they show up. With that in mind I'd say that the shark in The
Shallows is a bit like The
Joker in Suicide Squad
in the sense that you spend most
of the film simply wondering where the fuck they actually are and
feel mild indifferent when they do show up. However although The
Shallows might lack a huge
amount of screen time for the toothy bastard and it certainly lacks
the general quality of Jaws, the
film does excel in one area. It shows Blake Lively's cleavage and
arse quite a lot. Constantly cutting to a bit of side boob might not
be one of the main ingredients of a classic film but in her case I'd
argue that it's probably the thing that dreams are made of. Or at
least that's what the film hopes you'll think as it cuts to a
slow-motion shot of her chest as she screams and fears for her life.
If you're thinking of becoming a rapist then this is probably the
film for you.
Before
going into the movie, I assumed its title would be a reference to the
depth of water that Lively is swimming in. Having seen it I realised
the title is actually more of a reference to its superficial
obsession with filming her arse for about ninety minutes. In which
case that's fine, but as good as that title may well be, I personally think a better
one would have been 'Teeth and Tits'.
Well, according to the comedian Janey Godley, men like five things,
“They like their house, their kids, their job, they like sex and
sausages. And if you show them a picture of a shark they're fucking
over the moon”. But surely we aren't that easy to please are we?
Surely it takes a little more than that to entertain us? Well, a
friend of mine really seemed to have enjoyed the movie so I asked him
what was so great about it. His response was, “If I wasn't watching
gore, I was watching tits” and “She was pretty fit tbf”. Not
only that.. but I swear to God, and I hate to prove Godley right in
how simple we are as a gender.. but I promise that whilst watching
the film he was also eating a sausage.
However
that's not to say that my chum wasn't also gripped by the tension of
the film as there are a couple of jump scares, and it seems that he
fell for every single one of them. Apparently a shark can smell one
drop of human secretion in a million drops of water and trust me.. it
wouldn't take a shark to know that on a couple of occasions my friend
had very definitely cacked his pants. People slag off jump scares as
being cheap but when you have an exploitation film like this then I
do think that they have their place. The film just wants you to
have fun and jump scares are funny. He laughed at himself because he
was embarrassed and I laughed at him for being such a fucking pussy.
The film also obviously contains a few of those moments in which the
main character or the shark would do something and you'd think, “Oh
for fucks sake, come on”. I mean the entire third act is basically
bullshit. At one point Lively times how long it takes the shark to
swim a specific distance before she jumps in the water to grab
something. However it never seemed to occur to her that she timed the
shark swimming casually and that at the point she throws her meat
wrapped skeleton into the sea then he might speed the fuck up. Lucky
for her it seems that the filmmakers never thought about this either.
However,
all of the stupid moments like this also simply add to the fun. You
get to laugh at it at the time and you get to rip the piss out of it
as the credits roll and you make your way home. Which sort of sounds
like I'm saying that the film is shit and one of those 'so bad that
it's good' movies. But that's not what I mean at all really. Yes, its
filled with stupid moments, but so was something like this years
The Forest, however, that was
also as boring as fuck. I guess you should think of this as being
more like a Jason Statham film in that it's clearly not up there with
The Godfather and
Citizen Kane but it's
as legitimately entertaining as it intends to be by simply not taking
itself too seriously. It's basically a perfectly disposable Friday
night movie in that I can't think who it won't appeal to. I mean I
quite liked it and I don't think I'm a stupid person. I have a
degree, I like pretentious sounding films that were made by people
who died before I was born, and I'm still yet to try to stick my dick
in the toaster.. despite how warm it looks in there. However there
were two girls in the audience that also enjoyed the film and who
were, to put it bluntly, total fucking idiots. Ignoring the fact that
they looked like a couple of bulldogs that had been painted pink, at
one point one of them turned to the other and asked, “what's the
difference between high tide and low tide?” I mean how do you even
begin to answer such a fucking stupid question. All the information
she needed was in the fucking question. Her friend found a way of
answering however with the the words, “I don't know”. Thanks for
reading and see you next time motherfuckers.
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