47 Meters Down Attracts Some Sharks But Not Nearly Enough Fun

I'm starting to feel sorry for poor sharks at this point. They're always being paraded around in pop culture as ruthless killers when they're not even close to being the most deadly animal on the planet! Hippos kill more people per year than sharks and we're all getting awestruck by the cuteness of videos of baby hippos (don't get me wrong, baby hippos are incredibly adorable). Sharks, meanwhile, still get a reputation for being merciless senseless killers. That doesn't seem fair to me just like it also doesn't strike me as fair that sharks get their image further sullied by appearing in the disposable thriller 47 Meters Down.

It's time for a little vacation for sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt), especially since the more trepidatious Lisa is recovering from a bad break-up from her long-time boyfriend and is also suffering from a severe case of jealousy of her more outgoing sister. In order to get her out of her shell, Kate convinces Lisa to take up a potentially exciting offer two local guys propose to them; the two sisters can be taken to a boat in the middle of the ocean and lowered into the water in a cage that will allow them to see the various fishes and underwater life residing in the ocean. Lisa is worried about it but Kate pushes her to give it a go.

When they're first put underwater, it all seems to be going smoothly aside from the fact that they lose a disposable camera one of the crew members on the boat lent them. But the cage they're lowered in snaps free from the ropes holding it up and they plummet to the bottom of the ocean...47 meters deep into the ocean, to be precise. Sharks are circling, their individual oxygen supplies are running low, it's nearly impossible to communicate with the people on the boat...how are they gonna get out of this one? Looks like they're gonna have to work together and muster up a massive amount of courage because this won't be an easy swim for either of them.

All things considered, 47 Meters Down turned out to be a bit better than I expected but still came up short (shore?) of being something really fun or memorable. The film gets off to a poor start with overlong introductory sequences for our lead characters in the first act that try to breeze right through the obligatory characterization stuff so we can get to the shark-infested mayhem quicker, but it's still a lot of repetitive dialogue and one-note personalities we've got to wade through. The poorly done character-oriented stuff in this part of the movie also fails to provide a cohesive dramatic groundwork for what's to come as well.

Once Lisa and Kate actually get into the water, some moments of well-done intensity do occur as our two leads try to figure out how to survive underwater. Director Johannes Roberts, who seemed to be doing amateurish work in the dialogue-heavy character-heavy scenes in the first act, actually does well at handling these intense underwater scenes, especially in wide shots that are meant to reinforce just how deep below the surface Lisa and Kate are, those provide their intended dizzying effect well. Good job too on keeping the CGI sharks (who aren't in the movie nearly as much as you might imagine) framed and lit in a manner that keeps them menacing and the cracks in the CGI used to bring them to life less noticeable than they would be under different circumstances.

Even here though, some of the scenes meant to generate a lot of thrills are executed in a slipshod manner while Claire Holt and Mandy Moore's performances have flashes of ingenuity in them but mostly come off as boilerplate. If anyone's (understandably) coming to 47 Meters Down to get some true thrills or even just some cool death scenes, neither of those two elements are in heavy supply, with only brief bits and pieces in the movie (like a climactic swim to the surface that culminates in the movies one truly great schlocky human vs. shark moment) really reaching their full potential. A bizarrely somber twist ending that doesn't gel at all tonally with the rest of the movie only see's fit to end the disposable 47 Meters Down on an appropriately underwhelming note.