Beneath its perfectly entertaining surface, the film is a mess of contradictions that fails to live up to its own potential.
The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.
By the end, Cervantes’s heroes are at last free to move beyond representative confinement and finally speak freely as equals.
The film dwells in a murky middle ground where everything is overblown but meant to be taken at face value.
What makes The Shallows churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra’s visual acrobatics.
Sylvain White’s adaptation of The Losers is the second comic-book movie misfire of 2010 and hopefully the last.