Friday 10 April 2020

47 METERS DOWN: UNCAGED

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS GLUG GLUG GLUG

An in-name-only sequel that has nothing to do with the Mandy Moore movie from 2017 (except for naming the high school after Matthew Modine), this is a bog-standard sharks vs teenies horror that just about plays its mid-ranking cards well enough, but is stuck with a quartet of entirely uninteresting characters who stray into annoying and stupid so often that most of the time you're actually on the side of the sharks.

Four squealing nubiles (two of whom are unhappy stepsisters and the other two so undefined they barely register as life forms, let alone named characters) decide not to go shark-watching from a glass-hulled boat and instead take off into the Mexican jungle where one of them knows of a secret underwater entrance to a submerged Mayan temple. Inevitably (because they're all dumb as a bag of lemons) they split up, scream, knock priceless thousand-year-old archaeological treasures over, get lost, get stuck in narrow crevices, run out of air and get endlessly and repeatedly menaced by sharks. Will they manage to find an alternative route out, or will they suffocate and/or get eaten in the unexplored and unmapped catacombs?

Three quarters or so of 47 Meters Down: Uncaged takes place underwater and the photography is terrific, and a couple of the shark appearances are nicely effective. And at least it doesn't have a "really?!?!?" climactic plot swerve the way the first instalment did. But it's just hard to care when everyone is this thick - they don't use a guide line, they don't inform anyone where they are and where they're going - and it's sometimes hard to tell which girl is which behind the masks. The film does liven up considerably in its closing stretch when it finally starts shedding some blood, and starts racking up some suspense in the process, but it's too late in the running time. Final thought: the first film at least spelled Metres correctly; this has the "wrong" American spelling which means those of us with movie title OCD are going to have catalogue them in reverse order (and split them up entirely when someone makes a film called The 47 Methuselahs or something).

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