The film follows sisters Kate and Lisa, played by Claire Holt and Mandy Moore, on their trip to Mexico. In the middle of the night, Kate finds Lisa crying. Turns out her boyfriend recently broke up with her due to her being “too boring”. To cheer her up, Kate takes Lisa out for drinks where they meet two random guys. Before the night comes to an end, Kate and Lisa are invited to go cage diving the next day. Kate’s down for some face to face time with some sharks, but Lisa isn’t so sure. Kate, of course, convinces her to do it.
Kate is even more unsure about their upcoming adventure when she sees Captain Taylor’s boat, played by Matthew Modine. Modine is perfect for the part since he has that reassuring kind of voice, which comes in handy when telling Kate and Lisa that cage diving is perfectly safe. They, of course, believe him despite the fact that his boat looks older than time itself.
Once they’re in the cage and in the water, both girls start enjoying themselves. Everything is going perfectly until surprise, surprise, the rusty old boat’s rusty old steel cable ends up snapping, sending Kate and Lisa into the shark-infested water below. The cage crashes when it hits the ocean floor and is covered by the rig that was supposed to suspend them safely into the water. Oh, the irony.
Now Kate and Lisa must stay calm in order to save oxygen and figure out a way back to the surface. Luckily their face masks are equipped with two-way radios so they can keep in contact with each other as well as Captain Taylor. That is of course when he’s in range, which isn’t often. He does let them know that he is contacting the coastguard and doing everything in his power to bring them back up. You get a feeling that he could be lying and that adds to the uneasiness of the situation.
The rest of the movie deals with Kate and Lisa coming up with and trying different things in order to escape the depths of the ocean and the sharks that are close by. Most of the time we can’t see the sharks because the ocean is completely black, which is understandable. This helps with the jump scares and yes, of course, there are jump scares.
47 Meters Down is a low budget shark attack film that feels like exactly that. We get the usual jump scares and CGI sharks, but it’s actually relatively well done. The acting isn’t over the top like most b-movies and you get the feeling that these characters are actually scared. The only real problem I have is that it feels like they couldn’t decide on the perfect ending, so they used whatever ideas they had. All of them. These could be meant to be twists in the plot, but they don’t feel like it.
In conclusion, I still don’t like the ocean…
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