Seriously,
why didn’t they just go whale watching? They could have been safely drinking
coffee and eating scones on-deck. However, Kate thought her sister Lisa needed
to become more adventurous, so she cajoled her into some shark-cage-diving. She
might just fix her permanently in Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down (trailer here), which opens today nationwide.
Lisa
has just been dumped by her longtime BF for being a fuddy-duddy, so Kate took
his place on the vacation her sister had planned. Kate decides a little
shark-cage-diving will be good for what ails her, especially since they will be
joining two very single fellow tourists on the S.S. Rickety Barnacle, skippered
by the Captain Ron-like Taylor. Shrewdly, he doesn’t waste money on extravagantly
strong cable, allowing him to pass the savings on to you.
For
about ten seconds, Lisa and Kate ooh and ah at fish. Then the cable slips a
little and bam—47 meters down, baby. At this point they are in a world of hurt.
Good old Taylor just chummed the water so its shark central out there. They
only have about an hour of oxygen under the best of circumstances, but it is
depleting more quickly due to panic and exertion. Plus, their scuba coms are
only in range around the 40-meter mark, so someone will have to swim up seven
meters to talk to the boat.
As
set-ups go, Roberts and co-screenwriter Ernest Riera put the sisters in quite
the pickle. This is definitely a B-movie, but it is still pretty compelling to
watch the shark-bait siblings struggle to survive. Although a few scenes are a
bit murky, most of Mark Silk’s underwater cinematography is rather spectacular.
However, the ending is bound to be divisive. Viewers who manage to emotionally
invest will most likely get angry, but those who are only there for the shark
show will just say the heck with it.
Mandy
Moore and Claire Holt do almost all of their acting wearing diving masks, but to
their credit, they are convincingly freaked out. Frankly, as Captain Taylor,
Matthew Modine spends so much time explaining the Bends and nitrogen narcosis,
he could probably do safe-diving PSAs in his sleep. Roberts opts to keep him
largely off-camera as the disembodied voice they hear, so we never see Taylor
up-top, worrying about the scathing Yelp reviews the sisters will write if they
survive. As for the sharks, they are big.
