Blake Lively plays Nancy, a medical student taking time off from her studies and plans to go to a secluded beach in Mexico with a pal for some surfing. Let down by her friend she heads alone hoping for a period of self reflection as this was the beach her now deceased mother once visited when she was young.

While she is surfing alone she is attacked by a large shark. Injured, bleeding she is stranded on a rock. She looks for help but no one is about, her medical skills are used to patch herself up the best she can and she realises that she is only safe on the rock as it is low tide. As the tide rises, she needs to get to safety, but the shark is circling round. Nancy needs to somehow outwit the shark.

This is really a low budget B movie. The CGI is ordinary and the story is preposterous. Nancy is in a remote location but she gets excellent wifi and a mobile phone signal.

The shark is of course demented, hell bent in gobbling up Nancy when their are other food sources about (maybe he saw her performance in Savages!)

THE SHALLOWS is yet another survival flick in which a young, bikini-clad woman is menaced by an impossibly menacing killer shark. This one was shot on the glorious Queensland coast in Australia, and features Blake Lively (doing what her husband Ryan Reynolds did in BURIED) as a woman attacked and stranded by an improbably hungry shark. The film takes a minimalist approach but fails to entertain on the same level as similar mini-classics such as THE REEF and ROGUE, although it's still an enjoyable watch. The cinematography is very nice indeed, and the shark itself, although barely seen, utilises some effective CGI to create the menace. I was less impressed with the lead character, although her survivalist skills and instincts are fun, and I suppose that's what stopped me from being totally immersed in the experience as I was hoping to be. Still, this is a cut above all of the shark movies put out by The Asylum and SyFy Channel.

Texan Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) is a medical student vacationing in Mexico. Her friend abandons her for a guy. She wants to surf the same isolated beach as her late mother did many years ago. She gets a lift from local Carlos who doesn't tell her the name of the beach or doesn't understand her question. She is joined by two local surfers. She video-chats with her sister Chloe and then her father. She goes out alone, plays with dolphins, encounters a dead whale, and gets attacked by a shark.

Blake Lively has not been my favorite actress. She always seem like the SoCal girl no matter what the role requires. She's a beautiful woman but she has never struck me as a complex actress. Recently, she has gotten better. This one continues her recent uptick. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has cut his teeth on tight thrillers and horrors. He's able to squeeze out a small compelling little thriller out of Lively. The setting looks beautifully tropical. This is not anything ground breaking but it does work.