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Some people go on vacation to sit in a chair and soak up the sun. Others go for the adventure—the pictures that they can post on their social media pages and the stories that they can tell their friends. And in 47 Meters Down, a vacation adventure goes horribly wrong.
47 Meters Down follows sisters Lisa and Kate (Mandy Moore and Claire Holt) on a getaway to Mexico. Lisa’s boyfriend has just left her, claiming that he just got bored, so she’s determined to go out and have an adventure to prove that she’s not boring. Kate convinces her to try observing sharks from inside a shark cage. But what starts out as an exhilarating experience turns deadly when the winch breaks, dropping the sisters to the ocean floor, where they’re surrounded by deadly sharks and quickly running out of oxygen.
From the beginning, 47 Meters Down has the feel of a low-budget slasher movie; it’s cheesy and blatantly obvious. The main characters even make the same kind of stupid, reckless mistakes that slasher movie characters tend to make—just with sharks stalking them in the ocean instead of a serial killer in the woods.
After the women end up underwater, it’s quiet and dark and tense—and you never know when another shark will appear out of the darkness, its open mouth ready to chomp on whatever’s in its way. Of course, when it does, it’s completely out of nowhere, inevitably causing the theater to erupt in surprised shrieks.
Really, though, there’s just so much that you can do with two women stuck in a shark cage on the ocean floor. They attempt to escape, they try to regain communication with the people in the boat (led by Matthew Modine’s Captain Taylor), and they continually face attacks, catastrophes, and one setback after another. And, in the time left over, they also have the occasional heart-to-heart sisterly talk.
After a while, it feels like a mindless blur of watery darkness, panic, hysterics, flashes of sharks’ teeth, fake blood, and unpleasant sound effects. And even at just 89 minutes in length, it all tends to feel tedious and repetitive.
47 Meters Down definitely offers its share of tension and pointy-toothed scares. But unless you’re really in the mood for a shark movie, you’d probably be better off choosing a classic slasher flick. They’re still cheap and cheesy, but they’re generally more entertaining.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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