47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a "sequel" to the 2017 shark survival movie, 47 Meters Down. I use the quotation marks because it's hard to call it a sequel since no actors from the first movie return and the events of the first movie are never brought up. The people that do return for it though are the writer/director, Johannes Roberts, and his co-writer, Ernest Riera. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged tells the story of four girls who go scuba diving in this underwater Mayan city and along the way end up getting hunted by some sharks.
I have to be honest with this one, there wasn't much I liked about it. If I had to pick something I guess it would be the premise. I like shark movies and I like watching the destruction they can cause. Watching a group of people in a claustrophobic environment, trying to get away from sharks, should make for an interesting and fun movie. Unfortunately, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is neither interesting or fun.
I really don't like being negative and ripping a movie, so I'm going to keep this short. Since this movie takes place in an underwater city with tight corridors, at times it is extremely hard to tell what is going on. When the shark first appears, the characters kick up all this dirt from the ocean floor making it impossible to see anything except for their flashlight beams. When this happened, the inability to see was just annoying and didn't add any sort of suspense. You couldn't see the characters nor the shark so if something was going to happen it wouldn't matter because us as the audience wouldn't be able to see it. You also never get a sense of where the characters actually are. They swim down these tight corridors that the shark tries to swim through to get them, but can't fit, but magically somehow the shark ends up in the next section of the city. In a similar movie that came out this summer, Crawl, the movie set up the places the gators could and could not go to, so it made sense when the gators got to a place that the characters had entered. With 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, you just have to suspend any kind of logic and just try to accept that the shark can get from one area of the city to another.
The last third of this movie just becomes completely laughable. For some reason, when the sharks attack the people, the movie enters these horrendous slow motion sequences. I don't know if the intention of the director was to try and have these cinematic scenes that are cheesy as someone gets attacked or if he was trying to be serious and have the scenes be intense. Whatever he was going for it didn't work at all.
I'm sure a lot of people worked hard on this movie and are proud of what they accomplished, so here a some additional quick negatives. The acting is not that great and the fact that they are wearing scuba masks the entire time, you can't really get a sense of the fear they are experiencing. The characters aren't that likable at the beginning of the movie so once the shark starts to attack them, you end up rooting for the shark.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged is just a bad movie and it's not one of those it's so bad, it's fun to laugh at movies. The movie is not scary or tense. The sharks look horrendous. The acting is subpar. You can't see what is going on and when the sharks do try and attack someone, the director uses this horrible slow motion technique. I say skip this movie.
1 out of 5 Stars
