47 Meters Down
(USA, 89 min.)
Dir. Johannes Roberts; Writ. Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Mandy Moore, Claire Holt
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| Claire Holt and Mandy Moore star in 47 Meters Down. VVS Films |
The cautious tourists always have the craziest vacations.
Linda (Goldie Hawn) plays it safe and doesn’t talk to strangers during her
Ecuadorian nightmare, but she gets
kidnapped and terrorized by the cartel. Susan (Cate Blanchett) drinks Diet Coke
without ice to avoid germs in Morocco, yet a renegade bullet nips her whilst she
naps on a tour bus. Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) hesitantly agrees with her friend
Alice (Claire Danes) to swap Hawaii for Thailand and (whoops) finds herself spending
more time in jail than on the beach. Rose (Kate Winslet) follows her mother’s
orders until she rebels and finds love on a cruise ship until (whomp whomp) the boat sinks. Lonely Planet doesn’t prepare tourists
for plot twists.
Somewhere between Snatched, Babel, Brokedown Palace, and Titanic is the unfortunate vacation of boring and ever-so-cautious Lisa (Mandy Moore) in 47 Meters Below. Lisa takes a trip to Mexico with her adventurous sister Kate (Claire Holt) and the girls’ ideas of a wild getaway are about as different as mom jeans and itsy bitsy bikinis. When Lisa cautions Kate against joining some sexy Mexicans to swim with sharks in a sketchy cage dangled from an even sketchier boat, Kate convinces her sis to live on wild. Their dive seems great until (whomp whomp) the sketchy shark tank apparatus breaks and sends the girls to an all-inclusive stay at Davy Jones’ Locker. Trapped 47 meters beneath the surface in shark-infested waters, the girls are in full Blake Lively mode in depths from which only Jacques Cousteau could save them.
Moore, hot right now with This is Us, is a lot of fun in this scared-as-shit and totally
random performance. (IMDb trivia doesn’t indicate if she took the gig to pay
her mortgage.) Her shrill hysteria voices the fears that many viewers probably
have when it comes to swimming with sharks. 47
Meters Down often defies logic, but Moore’s Lisa is such an uptight and
frazzled survivor/ninny that one can’t help but root for her when she screams winners
like “The shark ripped him to pieces!” in reference to their friend who becomes
an amuse bouche.
The presence of Matthew Modine, whose appearance as the
crusty captain earned a collective chuckle at the Toronto press screening, adds
some novelty to the mix and a dash of camp, while Holt’s serviceably levelheaded
turn as the even-keeled Kate balances the feeding frenzy of Moore’s
fish-out-of-water performance. Among the cast, the sharks chew the least
scenery.
“That’s, like, the biggest shark I’ve ever seen!” screams
Lisa and/or Kate as they watch the CGI sharks circle the cage with
tooth-gnashing hunger. The sharks in this deep-sea horror flick are nasty
predators and they’re big, fat, menacing, and, like, wonderfully fake. The baddies of 47 Meters Down swim in good company with bloodthirsty killers like
Bruce and the shark that exploded after being smacked by Adam West. (If only
the girls had some Shark Repellent Bat Spray.)
Director Johannes Roberts thankfully finds just the right balance
of suspense and ridiculousness as 47
Meters Down has a hoot with a story that we’ve seen before. Stupid
decisions abound and they largely figure into Lisa’s risk-averse attitude,
which plays into the shark/shark bait tango as the girls realize that they must
escape the cage to survive. Each trip outside the “safety” of the cage brings
them deeper into the danger zone, but staying put makes death inevitable when
one only has so much oxygen. The brisk running time of the film keeps the
atmosphere tense as the oxygen supplies in Kate and Lisa’s scuba tanks serve as
a ticking bomb that nudges Lisa to oscillate between panic and survival mode.
At the same time, the far climb to the surface through shark-infested waters
adds another element of danger since a swift ascent brings the threat of the
bends and fatal nitrogen bubbles in the brain. Swim too quickly and they die,
swim too slowly and the sharks gobble them up. Add some Wikipedia-checked
one-liners on scuba diving and 47 Meters
Down has more than enough currents to keep the audience guessing.
The dark setting of the sea floor and its murky waters
(reportedly made cloudy with chopped up broccoli) up the tension and provide
lots of legitimate scares as Roberts plays with space and lighting. The opaque
water leaves one anticipating a head-on collision between the girls and the
sharks as the venture into open water. Between the pop-out scares and harmless
silliness of the girls’ adventure, 47
Meters Down offers a wave of thrills without ever taking itself too
seriously, like a three-star inclusive resort contentedly filled with rowdy
spring breakers and Mandy Moore as the horrified mom on family vacation. What
more do you want in a movie that has, like, the biggest sharks you’ve ever
seen?
47 Meters Down opens in theatres June 23.
