47 Meters Down is directed by Johannes Roberts and stars Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, the story is about two sisters on vacation in Mexico are trapped in a shark cage at the bottom of the ocean, with less than an hour of oxygen left and great white sharks circling nearby, they must fight to survive.
I was actually interested in this movie, I love sharks I’ve always been fascinated by them, it was originally going to be direct-to-video like last year and the company that distributed it picked it up and gave it a theatrical release at the very last minute, they changed the title and with that all been said this film should of stay direct-to-video.
47 Meters Down is the kind of film that’s great in concept but once you actually see it in execution you realize just how simple of a story it is and that when they get in the water they just have to stay in the cage and there’s some sharks.
After Jaws, countless shark movies have tried to replicate that success even the Jaws sequels couldn’t do it and the problem that they all have is that they all seem to think the reason Jaws is so good is the shark, it’s not it’s the characters.
The reason I love Jaws is because of characters like Chief Brody and Matt Hooper and Quint not just because a shark pops up a lot in the last half but every shark movie after that just thinks people want to see sharks a lot, who cares about character right.
The characters in this movie are atrocious, the reasoning behind why they even get into the cage the entire motivation for the rest of the movie is because Mandy Moore character just got dumped and she wants to make her ex-boyfriend jealous by posting photos of her doing something really exciting, because he thinks she’s really boring.
The banter that goes back and forth between these sisters is so over-the-top and so idiotic there’s nothing subtle about any of it, it’s very loud and kind of grating and it feels like you’re watching a straight to VOD movie which makes sense because that’s what they were originally making.
It also seems like the film thinks it’s a lot scarier than it actually is, the director actually put his name right above the title when it comes up in the beginning, he must think he’s John Carpenter or something.
The motivation for them getting into the water was so weak the first ten minutes was just your stereotypical setup to try to make the characters interesting in some way so the only thing they do is have Mandy Moore to be going through a breakup and that’s it after that they’re in the water, the sharks really disappointed as well, they look fine but they don’t seem to really have much to do other than to every once in a while create a jump-scare, there terribly inept coming out of the darkness with a loud burst of music and why do I say that because they’re really awful at biting, they’re constantly missing the limbs of these girls because there the main characters.
The ending of the film is also definitely going to polarize people because it’s one of those endings where you’re like I didn’t care before and now I really don’t care at all.
47 Meters Down is very disappointing I didn’t find the film scary, I found the characters awful, the performances are pretty bad too unfortunately.
I’m going to give 47 Meters Down a 2 out 10.
