Blake Lively locked in entertaining battle of wits with shark in The Shallows

REVIEW: FOR a movie featuring nothing but Blake Lively in a battle of wits with a very agitated shark, The Shallows makes good on its simple promises.

The Shallows (M)

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra (Run All Night)

Starring: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Angelo Josue Lozano Corzo, Jose Manuel Trujillo Salas.

Rating: ***

Choose life ... or get chewed.

A MOVIE featuring nothing but Blake Lively in a battle of wits with one very agitated shark.

And it delivers more than many of the big-budget blockbusters that have crashed and burned in recent months.

Says a lot about what a crazy, mixed-up year it has been at the cinema, doesn’t it?

While there ain’t much deep or meaningful to The Shallows, it makes good on its simple promise of keeping the splashes, gnashes and gashes coming while tension levels continue to peak at just the right side of unbearable.

Blake Lively, who plays Nancy, on set in The Shallows. Picture: Supplied

In a refreshingly reductive set-up, Lively plays Nancy, a med student going through some kind of mid-college crisis that only a surfing holiday in Mexico can fix.

One sunny day, Nancy scores a ride to a remote beach to catch some waves. The location is a picturesque cove that is home to a swell of such consistent high quality that the locals keep its name and exact GPS co-ordinates a secret from nosy tourists.

Once this background information is logged with the viewer, The Shallows gets straight down to business.

Nancy wades out alone to where the waves are breaking best, and before long, that terrifyingly territorial shark is doing his worst.

Blake Lively in a scene from The Shallows

Nancy’s chances of survival are pinned to three physical features of the cove that, if used correctly, can keep her out of biting range from the enemy.

First of all, there is the rotting carcass of a dead whale, which the shark has been using as (and zealously protecting) as a floating buffet.

About 20m south sits a rocky outcrop on which Nancy can safely perch herself when the tide is low enough. Then another 20m northwest a metallic beacon-buoy is bobbing about as another option for temporary refuge.

Blake Lively in a scene from The Shallows.

To up the angsty ante for Nancy, there is a working mobile phone sitting in her bag on the beach. However, making a swim for it is out of the question. (The occasional pedestrian wandering along the beach is also of little use, for reasons best left unexplained.)

At its core, The Shallows is as traditional as a shark movie can be.

The villain is a finned food-processor always ready to make himself another surfie smoothie. The hero (ine) is a human half-scared out of her wits, and half-clever enough to never to run out of ideas about how to survive.

So what’s not to like here? Not much. You’ll be afraid, amused, alarmed and rather exhausted, all inside 80 short, sharp, shark-infested minutes.

Originally published as Blake Lively locked in entertaining battle of wits with shark in The Shallows