It may seem like 47 Meters Down is arriving this summer because of the success of the Blake Lively shark-a-rific thriller The Shallows. But, the Mandy Moore and Claire Holt starring shark-centric suspense-fest was already in the works prior to that film becoming a hit. Filmmakers are just hoping that audiences are ready to go two-for-two in the summer shark movies that make you scared to go in the water, much as Jaws famously did decades ago.
Where The Shallows was the Lively coming-out and proving herself as an actress who could carry an entire movie on her shoulders, 47 Meters Down is much more of an average to below average predatory horror-ish flick.
Moore is Lisa and Holt portrays her younger sister Kate. They’re in Mexico on a vacation that was meant to be for Lisa and her ex-boyfriend. Instead, she took her sister and the opportunity to bond and mend a broken heart has great potential on the South of the Border’s sandy beaches. They meet a couple of guys on a night out and the two Mexican cuties invite them to experience the once-in-a-lifetime wonder and awe of being lowered into the Pacific Ocean in a steel cage and coming face-to-face with the greatest underwater killers on the planet. You know the ones, those charming razor-sharp bearing creatures that are given an entire week of saluting on the Discovery Channel.
As the moment of truth inches closer, Lisa is less and less thrilled at the idea. But, when her sister plays the “your ex will think you’re cool” card, she dives right in and our terror tale truly begins. After witnessing their first shark and as both become giddy with excitement, their cage commences rattling and fate sends them 47 Meters Down to the ocean floor. Running out of oxygen, too far from the surface to swim for it (what, between the sharks and those killer bends), our sisters must grapple with a fate that was nowhere near the plans either had for the day.
Oh, there’s another issue. They’re so far down in the deep that they are out of reach to communicate with the boat’s captain, Taylor (Mathew Modine, nice to see him on the screen again). Each time they need to communicate with the surface, one of our sisters has to swim up and each of these moments adds up to a decent amount of summer movie thrills.
Instead of shock and awe, 47 Meters Down produces more LOLs than gasps. But, it certainly deserves an “E” for effort. Frankly, we’re surprised no one has thought of this premise before. The suspense and moral dilemmas practically write itself. Execution of it, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame. It is one that is littered with landmines of too much exposition, not enough battling the sharks themselves and the issues of having 85-percent of the movie exist solely underwater. Challenges abound, but co-writer and director Johannes Roberts manages to deliver a somewhat decent flick that could easily have gone direct to the DVD dustbin in other hands.
Moore and Holt are fine, but neither are the actress that produced that terrific tenacity exhibited by Lively last summer in her shark movie. One does not get the sense of urgency that the situation clearly demands out of either actress. Since we spend practically the entire movie with these two, that is a problem. They do the most with the material, but a tighter and more elevated tension-laden script would have helped. It is hard to believe that a movie about two women stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a steel cage surrounded by sharks and hundreds of feet of water between them and the surface would not produce a more palpable horror habitat.
One thing 47 Meters Down does do is eliminate a bucket list item for this guy. No cage diving with the sharks in my future. That is a small victory, I suppose. Jaws certainly prevented a whole lot of ocean swimming for anyone who saw it back in its day.
Grade: C