47 Meters Down: Uncaged Movie Review: Misfiring undersea thriller
Johnson Thomas
Those who missed seeing the original will not have to bother much about story continuation because this film is not connected to the original other than by name and the undersea shark infestation theme. The story here is about new characters entirely.
Mia (Sophie Nelisse), her stepsister Sasha (Corinne Foxx) and two other friends Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone) play truant, deep dive into a remote lagoon adjacent to the entrance to a submerged Mayan city that Mia’s dad recently discovered, and end up battling blind sharks while running out of oxygen in the interim.
Once again we see a set-up where American kids show up as being callous and disdainful regarding their own safety. Don’t get your hopes up thinking this could be a cautionary tale. It’s not.
It’s a desperate situation, no doubt. The girls are fast running out of air supplies and several blind sharks are hot on their heels. The twisty, increasingly cramped underwater Mayan civilisation cave dwellings add to their despair. A few additional characters pop up from time to time, but even before they can help, they get devoured. This kind of set-up is merely meant to increase the degree of difficulty for the foursome – making their escape almost next to impossible. It’s all so predictable and ludicrous.
Returning co-writers Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera don’t appear to have any air left for intriguing creativity. They use borrowed ideas and plagiarised set-ups to go around in circles. Everyone in the film acts like an absolute idiot and that’s as challenging as it gets for them. The visual effects are pitiful, there’s very little tension and the claustrophobia induced by darkened underwater caverns is lost in the by-the-numbers edict here. The performances of the cast are also quite unremarkable. Indifference is the hallmark of this sequel. In fact none of the characters appear sympathetic enough for us to care about them. This is a film that hopes to cash in on the unexpected success of the first – but it forgets that it’s just a pale, unexceptional and entirely half-hearted copy!
