It’s only after those two men leave the beach, of course, that danger strikes. When Nancy takes to the waves, she gets coached on the peculiarities of the area by a pair of local surfers, who explain that there’s one low tide, which turns a small underwater rock formation into a miniature island. The family backstory is conveyed efficiently, at beachside, by Nancy’s smart-phone screen, which is impressively superimposed on the seascape, dominating half the movie screen, as she talks with her younger sister (Sedona Legge) and her father (Brett Cullen) and looks at pictures of her mother in good and bad times. Yet once that note is sounded, near the start, it goes undeveloped throughout the rest of the film. She’s driven to the beach by a local man named Carlos (Óscar Jaenada), who teases her about gazing at her cell phone while surrounded by splendid landscapes (she admits, “Yes, I’m American”) and who asks her earnestly how she intends to get back from the remote site (she responds, flippantly, “Uber”).
Despairing of the efficacy of medicine and the usefulness of exertion, Nancy has dropped out of medical school this sentimental journey to Mexico is meant as the first uncertain step in a new life. Lively conveys a sense of floating outside of time, blending the enduring with the elusive, which is why she was so well cast in “ The Age of Adaline,” a time-travel melodrama of sorts that makes much of her natural air of slightly distracted loftiness.Ĭollet-Serra (working with a script by Anthony Jaswinski) builds that note into the setup of “The Shallows”: Nancy, a woman of about twenty-five, is travelling to a remote Mexican beach that meant a lot to her mother, who has died (seemingly of cancer) and whom she’s mourning. She’s one of the best, and worst-deployed, younger actors, and a sign of the movie’s weakness is that the exact same story with the exact same derring-do probably wouldn’t have had different, or less, emotional energy in the incarnation of other actors. Lively’s stardom is at the heart of the film. Since the young woman, Nancy Adams, is played by a star, Blake Lively, it seems a foregone conclusion that she’ll survive the ordeal, and the only question is how-or, rather, what credibility-straining heroics and cinematic shock effects the director, Jaume Collet-Serra, will cram into the story of her survival. Sorry to say that “The Shallows” has made itself too easy a target with its title: it stays all too close to the surface of its story, a young woman’s pure physical struggle to survive while confronting a shark at an isolated beach. Photograph Courtesy SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT
Blake Lively in a scene from “The Shallows,’ the new film by Jaume Collet-Serra.
0 kommentar(er)
