47 Meters Down: Uncaged

2017’s 47 Meters Down was as simple and bland as one could get with a shark movie: two girls get trapped in a cage underwater with sharks surrounding them. That’s it. But despite a convincingly appealing and straightforward premise, that movie failed to make much of itself despite two strong leads at its center. But since everyone else enjoyed it enough, emphasis on “enough,” we now get 47 Meters Down: Uncaged. But with the exception of a wink and a nod to the previous film’s captain, this story is largely new, with new characters and a new environment.

But it nonetheless retains many of, if not more of, the same mistakes and hinderances as the previous film, with no thought put into where to take the story and instead rely on its b-rated cast and its b-movie structure for entertainment, which can sometimes work, but clearly doesn’t here. For the record, it’s by no means a “terrible” movie as it boasts a few of fun set pieces and impressive uses of shadows, lighting, and visual effects. But regardless, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is merely a retread, if not a downgrading of, the same scares, bland characterizations, and predictable set ups as its predecessor.

Stepsisters Mia (Sophie Nélisse) and Sasha (Corinne Fox) sadly refuse to get along with one another after their parents moved them to Yucatan, Mexico to explore an ancient Mayan city that has since been submerged by the ocean. One day, in an attempt to reconcile the two siblings, their father (John Corbett) sends them off to a boating tourist experience. But Sasha’s friends Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone) has other plans, inviting the two to on a much more pleasant excursion. They end up in a lagoon that leads to the abandoned city, which they decide to explore via scuba gear provided originally for research purposes. Everything goes swimmingly (no pun intended) until a pillar collapses and traps them in the cave system/ruins. Desperate and with only so much oxygen in their tanks, the girls must search the endless caverns for a way out or risk suffocating or being eaten by sharks that inhabit the caves.

As the story begins, we need to get through a few narrative bullet points before we get to the carnage that’ll inevitably transpire. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the bullet points are pleasant to get through. It’s practically chock-full of every cliché and generic “broken family” trope in the book. It sets up the central family conflict, if you want to call it that, and it feels like they’re telling you exactly what will happen in the next hour and a half. You have two sisters who don’t like each other, with one of them stating “She’s not my sister.” So pretty much the story is about them learning to like each other, and it just feels thin.

It’s also predictable in the sense that there’s no sense of tension with who dies and who lives because the opening 20 minutes practically spells it out for you. At the start, we meet our characters, and as the camera passes/introduces each one, you can point to the screen and think to yourself, “You’re dead, and you’re dead, and you’re dead…” and so on. You know there’s a problem when rather than hoping your lead heroines find a way out of their nightmarish hell-hole, you wait in anticipation as to how the sharks will pick them off one by one.

It doesn’t help that the rest of the time the sisters and their friends never feel like characters but rather just cannon fodder for the sharks to snack on. Speaking of which, the carnage really takes its time to begin and thus we must resort to tagging along with these characters and their personal struggles, all of which never feel like they have life to them. The characters are paper-thin, carbon-copies of your average friend group who are served on a dinner plate for the sharks. The only personalities they have are the ones assigned to their respective horror/thriller stereotypes. There’s our lead girl, her sister, the smart one, the arrogant one, and then the male characters who are all just there to add some red to the water. Although I will admit that there is a clever death scene that harkens back to another, better shark movie that I did enjoy.

But even when the carnage and killing does begin, the results are mixed at best. On the positive side, director Johannes Roberts imbues quite a number of impressively spooky and dreadful sequences. His use of shadows and lighting allow for some frightening imagery to take shape. My favorite shot is when you first see the sharks on the screen, when one girl is looking ahead and, in a brief wave of a light, the shark swims behind her without her noticing. You see a few of those shots throughout the movie and, give credit where credit’s due, it’s impeccably well done.

But those moments are merely bright little sparks in an otherwise dimly-lit and confusingly-shot environment. While it’s refreshing to explore a new kind of cage for our heroes to be trapped in, the results are much more scattered and unfocused. When the action kicks in, you can’t really tell who’s who given the dim lighting and the fact that all the characters wear the same scuba gear. This is especially problematic with the fact that the film boasts a larger cast of characters compared to basically the two sisters in the first film.

The visual effects also offer up well-conceived creature designs for the sharks themselves, who take a detour in terms of their physical appearance from the previous film. In the story, the sharks evolved within the cave system without light. This results in them possessing a pale white skin tone along with blank eyes accompanying their blindness. This makes for an effectively unsettling appearance for the sharks, making them like phantoms in the dark.

47 Meters Down: Uncaged is basically a pale and uninspiring repeat of what came before. While 47 Meters Down wasn’t great, it at least had a steady focus on its characters and their situation. With its sequel, the script jumbles the characters in a confusing and unsatisfying maze of murky waters and goofy characters and dialogue. It’s admittedly really difficult to do something different with a story that can be summed up as “sharks attack people.” Not a lot of movies do that, but there are plenty who at least make an attempt, even the bad ones. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged just feels like no one cared to try, and that laziness kept it from staying afloat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXjx8SZbv8&t=1s&w=585