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This movie started out well. A very attractive woman surfing on a beautiful, secluded beach. There was some great cinematography and shots of the area. Blake Lively even seems to be a decent actress. Then the shark stuff starts, and from the very beginning, we have to forget about everything we know about sharks and play pretend. First of all, she really ticks off the shark somehow by disturbing its "feeding grounds." She approaches a dead whale that the shark was feeding on and seems to have offended the shark somehow. So the shark ignores the thousands of pounds of floating, dead meat in the water for the rest of the movie, and pursues the 100 pound surfer girl exclusively. The surfer seeks refuge on the carcass of the whale, then the shark drags a dead whale many times its size further out into the ocean, and seems hell bent on knocking her off. In her escape from the floating whale to a small rock outcropping, she's bitten by the shark, and has some serious wounds from both the bite and coral. The shark is circling her, she's bleeding heavily, and there's no one around who can help. At this point, I'm still willing to forgive the whole shark ignoring the dead whale to pursue a person who isn't even in the water any more. It still felt suspenseful. I wanted her to find a way out and survive. The movie still had my interest and I still cared what happened to her. Then things got real, real stupid. The shark continued to circle, and killed a drunk on the beach who was trying to reach her. Then it killed two other surfers that she'd met the day before. It tried jumping up on the coral to reach her, and pretty much completely stopped acting like a shark. She managed to escape to a buoy as the tide came in, and the shark proceeded to rip the giant, steel buoy to pieces. She shoots the shark with a flare gun then lights whale oil in the water on fire with it, also lighting the shark on fire. I had already written off the movie at this point, but kept watching as I was already close to the end. She then ties herself to the anchor that was holding the buoy in place, and as the shark breaks the chains away she is pulled hundreds of feet under water in the matter of a couple of seconds, and the shark chases her at full speed with reckless abandon to kill her. It ends up impaling itself on the jagged spikes which were apparently part of the anchor. And yea, that was it. A stranded, wounded surfer with nothing kills an over 20 foot long shark by making it chase her into spikes. Dumb. You know what would have been good? A wounded surfer on a small rock outcropping tries to keep her sanity and get help to survive a shark attack. Leave out the dead whale because that kind of made the rest of the movie not make sense. Don't make a wounded, half dead surfer kill a 20+ foot shark, that's not the victory that the movie needed. It would have been sufficient to have her survive. You don't have to schlock it up with the typical Hollywood type ending. Sharks are scary enough, you don't have to make it cartoonish shark with a vendetta against a surfer. Every time the shark did something stupid that a shark would never do, it became less suspenseful. I don't know why they went down that road, but they turned a movie that started out pretty suspenseful into a SciFi Channel made for TV special with a dumb ending.

How this movie got 7 out of 10 stars is beyond me,the scenery was nice, but it was worse then open water and about as boring and drawned out that it could possibly get. Basically it contained 4 characters which all die but one person of course we know who didn't die. The ending was even worse when she kills the shark by guiding it to its death when it gets stabbed by the buoy pipes. I had waited a while to see this movie and was really disappointed, at one point the two guys come back and she is screaming shark, shes on the rocks and they ignore her, morons get in the water and soon enough are eaten. So then we are subjected to blake talking to a seagull and timing the swim, evidentally she knows the sharks swimming routine.I have really nothing more to say but have to keep writing because of the limit, let's just say I wasted 1.5 hrs of my life to route for a shark

Well, This movie is the worst movie I have seen this year. I just saw Blake Lively in Cafe Society, and there she really could show what she is capable of. In The Shallows the director only showed us what a fine figure she has for her age. I was never afraid of the shark and sometimes laughed because it all was so ridiculous. With sky-ping and speaking to a camera the director wanted to give a modern touch to the movie but that was simply to fill the gaps of the story and nearly make me walk out of the theatre. I had to think a lot of Jaws, the movie of Steven Spielberg of 1975. Why are the old movies so much better than the new movies? Please stop with these nonsense and show us the old movies. I felt very sorry for Blake Lively that she had to appear in such a bad movie, where nothing happens. What a disappointment. The only good thing about the movie was that it not lasted more than 80 minutes.

I wanted to like this movie. I really did, but its just bad. Basically we have a hot blond chick that gets stranded on a rock with a shark trying to get her. Now here's the biggest flaw in the movie. There is a 2 ton whale that is barely eaten in the same location as this girl. So why is the shark interested in a 90lb woman over a 2 ton whale? Oh not only is this shark after this woman, this shark attempts to climb rocks, go through jellyfish, tries to climb its way through a buoy drone and basically stalk this girl for like two days when it has a nice huge whale right there? That made no sense at all. The next issue is the woman is apparently a superhero since she can suffer massive blood lost, jellyfish stings, dehydration, concussions and yet still swim like an Olympic swimmer by out swimming a great white shark. C'mon.

People often underestimate or under-appreciate the ability to produce a genuinely good B-movie. There's Renny Harlin on one end of the spectrum, making crap like The Legend of Hercules, 12 Rounds, and The Covenant. But then you have someone like Jaume Collet-Serra, who knows a thing or two about framing a scene, getting good performances from his actors, and above all, making an entertaining movie. The Shallows could have been an otherwise conventional and forgettable thriller without Collet-Serra's strong and stylish direction. For example, the scene when Blake Lively's character first gets attacked by the shark is beautifully composed - in one unbroken take, no less - and legitimately nightmarish, with the red blood slowly overtaking the blue screen. It also doesn't hurt that Lively successfully carries the entire film on her shoulders, giving what is arguably the best performance in her career to date. There's a quiet fierceness and admirability to her character that makes it easy to root for her survival. Overall, there's a lot to like about The Shallows. It's gorgeously shot, suspenseful, emotionally gratifying, and entirely successful on what it sets out to be - a solid B-movie, and it takes skill to pull that off. Sure, it doesn't match the heights of either Gravity or The Martian, but then again, its budget is a mere fraction of what those films cost.

......to compare it to Jaws in anyway is an absolute insult. CGI shark that you only actually see in total for around 2 minutes of the film is quite lame, I just don't understand how people are so impressed with it. The seagull is actually the star of the show here and I was routing for him more than Nancy ! Some of the sharks behaviour was completely ridiculous........when has a great white ever jumped out of the water onto a pile of rocks for its prey ?! Just a completely unbelievable story that could have been so much better overall. On a positive note the cinematography was good as were 6 mins of the film........the other 80 were very disappointing.........don't rush to the cinema for this one, borrow someone's DVD if they buy it !!!!!!

Pluses: Location photography is wonderful. Blake Lively is easy on the eyes and has some good moments acting wise. The Seagull steals the movie -- best character and best character arc by far. Minuses: 1. The Seagull is the best character and has the best character arc in the movie 2. Overdirected in all the wrong places 3. Doesn't establish the water as the threat rather than the shark (a la Jaws), so all the tension lets out the moment the shark drops under the waves 4. CGI overkill. Clever mix of CGI and practical effects is the key, why does this simple equation still elude so many directors?? 5. Blake Lively also has some very bad moments acting wise. Mostly when it comes to moments of peril. Part of this may have to do with the fact that a portion of this movie was shot in a giant pool. If you want to do this right, go Revenant with it and stick her out in the ocean. It would have informed her performance more. 6. Not shot entirely in a real environment. So many scenes were clearly shot in a tank with the backdrop put in digitally. The scenes that are actually shot on location feel much more visceral. Had the whole movie been that, this likely would have been a different review. 7. Terrible terrible script!!! This was a Blacklist script? Seriously. Unless someone went through after the fact and tagged on a bunch of unnecessary plot arcs and hack dialogue onto a brilliant script, we may all have to reassess Blacklist's veracity. This is absolute garbage. Had this just been about a surfer chick nursing her grief with a world tour trip to all her late mother's favorite surf spots who then runs afoul of a rogue shark things would be fine. But no, there is this added on backstory of her dropping out of medical school, and a stock father and sister who spout inane expository dialogue. For what? I don't care whether she goes back to medical school or not. Completely unnecessary and offers no stakes. And the last scene of the flick is teeth clenchingly bad. The absolute worst kind of wrap-it-all- up-with-a-bow happy ending nonsense that is the hallmark of terrible movies. 8. NO STAKES. Nothing builds from one moment to the next. There are just sporadic moments of watered down shark attack mayhem interspersed with indulgent and unnecessary slo-mo shots of Blake Lively looking off into the horizon. 9. Inconsistent physical state. One scene Lively is close to death with sores on her lips and eyes burning red from dehydration. The next scene she's swimming with Olympian vigor and her complexion is vibrant and crystal clear. Never once did I fear that the elements might kill her before the shark did. 10. Stalker level overkill of T&A. Can't believe I'm complaining about this but by the 10th time the camera was crammed up Lively's butt or down her cleavage I was over it. Give us one or two shots to show off her body and move on. She's beautiful and deserves the attention, but when bikini shots outnumber shark shots in a shark movie you've gone too far.

Wow. Just wow. Even if you are the king of suspension of disbelief this may prove a challenge. Severed but crawling upper body (zero blood pressure hello?)? A buoy with a flare gun, really? A self-impaling shark, why!? With Blake Lively being seriously outplayed by the fine acting of Steven Seagull, I feel she might want to a) get acting lessons and/or b) get an agent who can cut through the trash scripts. All those shampoo commercial shots of her derriere, cleavage and hair for the first twenty minutes made me think I was watching Fox. This movie makes In the Deep (2016) seem like a profound and meaningful masterpiece. This movie is pure garbage. You have been warned.