47 Meters Down: Uncaged sees four teenage girls submerged in an ancient Mexican cave with two hungry sharks as company.Gareth Gatrell/Courtesy of VVS
- 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
- Directed by Johannes Roberts
- Written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera
- Starring Sophie Nélisse, Corinne Foxx and John Corbett
- Classification PG
- 89 minutes
It is not often that you watch a killer-shark movie and start feeling sympathy for the shark. But 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is no ordinary killer-shark movie – it is much, much worse.
Director Johannes Roberts’s quickie sorta-sequel to his sorta-remembered 2017 film 47 Meters Down, this new film borrows from the best entries in the genre (Jaws, sure, but also The Shallows and Deep Blue Sea) and mangles them into something unworthy of chum.
Roberts and his returning co-writer Ernest Riera take four barely defined teenage girls (including Canadian actress Sophie Nelisse, who is quickly identified as the moral centre of the bunch because she wears overalls instead of a bikini) and submerge them inside an ancient Mexican cave, with only two lost and blind great white sharks for company.
If you’re looking for a connection to the original Mandy Moore-starring film, there isn’t one aside from how Johannes again tries – and fails – to match the intense below-the-surface claustrophobic atmosphere of The Descent, another obvious inspiration. There are small spurts of creativity – notably the deployment of a dramatic device I’m going to nickname Chekhov’s Shark Tooth – but everything else about the production feels more watered down than the landscape our four interchangeable leads find themselves flailing about in.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged opens Aug. 16
Barry Hertz