With Jaws having set the bench mark so impossibly high for shark films few movies have come anywhere near to equalling let alone beating Spielberg’s blockbusting masterpiece. The last few years saw a resurgence in summer shark movies starting with The Shallows then 47 Metres Down and finally the mega budgeted ‘The Meg‘ which made a mega $530m with a sequel soon to follow. And whilst The Shallows had no sequel, 47 Metres Down, the lowest budgeted of them all at only $5m, made back its money 10 times over. So now we have 47 Metres Down Uncaged where the heroines rather than being trapped in a cage are now trapped in a sunken city only to find giant albino sharks keen to snack on the four school friends.
Written and directed again by Brit Johannes Roberts (The Strangers Prey at Night) he’s again conjured up some decent scares and moments to make you jump even on a small screen as he puts the four girls through turmoil. Changing the location from a cage to sunken city works well with the girls blindly swimming through narrow tunnels and corridors as their oxygen depletes ever more and anyone who suffers from claustrophobia will find several of the scenes unsettling. An anonymous bunch of female leads up the ante as to who, if any, will survive and there’s only Sylvester Stallone’s daughter, Sistine, in her feature film debut and its no real surprise that characters pop up only to be dispensed with by the sharks as is obligatory for the genre. TomandAndy, who have never really topped their score for Roger Avary’s ‘Killing Zoe’ continue their work on horror thrillers here with a decent enough soundtrack.
Inevitably characters are set up to be nothing more than shark bait but at 90 minutes this breezes along. Sadly 47 Metres Down didn’t get a theatrical release in the UK and with it already having turned a profit it is likely we will see more in what’s becoming a franchise. The big disappointment with the release is that it is a vanilla disc with no bonus features at all which is a shame as having interviewed the director some years ago he would have made a good yak-track. Nonetheless 47 Metres Down Uncaged is a worthy Saturday night film with a pizza and four pack.
Here’s the 47 Metres Down Uncaged trailer…….
