By George Haerle
For The Daily World
There’s only one really good shark movie out there, and everyone know what it is.
Since Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” there have been many different takes on scenarios where sharks get to eat multiple people on film. While many of them been outright chummers (the “Jaws” sequels, “Open Water”), the few that succeed do so because they’re cheesy popcorn munchers like “Deep Blue Sea” and “The Shallows.”
“47 Meters Down” is the next worthy addition to trashy shark film fun. By no means will anyone call it a good movie, but the cheap, cringe-inducing thrills and hilariously poor choices made by the central characters make it simple, brainless fun that is worthy of B-movie aficionados and popcorn movie lovers alike.
Sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) vacation in Mexico because the former is going through a harsh breakup. (In the movies, apparently, only cheap plot devices create reasons to go on vacation in Mexico.) Cue the late-night party montage with awful pop music, booze and chiseled dudes. Not long afterward, they’re convinced by a couple of local charmers to go shark cage diving with some backwater boat captain.
The boat looks like a salvaged wreck with the shoddiest-looking shark cage ever. The deckhands start illegally chumming the water, and Lisa — not wanting to be a stick in the mud and to prove to her ex back home she can be exciting — decides it’s cool to pretend she has scuba diving experience when she doesn’t. The kicker: Neither of the girls seems to notice the multi-hundred pound, rusty shark cage is raised and lowered not by a heavy-duty metal cable, but a regular everyday rope.
Whoops! The rope broke! Their cage drops 47 meters to rock bottom, somehow avoiding such trivial things as rapid pressure change; and the sharks follow them, circling in the murk of the abyssal ocean. Their air is running out and the sharks are hungry, but the radios in their scuba masks are just out of range of the boat above them.
What follows for the next hour or so is some fantastically poor decision-making: The girls leave the cage multiple times to contact the boat, even swimming over a bottomless trench; a deckhand tries to deliver fresh air tanks by himself. We also see some of the worst CGI fish ever (though the sharks look decent).
There’s no need to really go see “47 Meters Down” in the theater unless you are itching for some popcorn and a lazy afternoon matinee you don’t have to think about. It ratchets up the tension like an overtorqued lug nut during several scenes, and you’ve already seen it done better in “The Shallows” — or much, much better in “Jaws.”
And while “47 Meters Down” could probably be considered a subpar movie, it’s is a good kind of bad — so much so that the movie flips a massive double bird to the audience at one point, when you may just laugh at how hilariously cruel it is. Yet it never becomes off-putting, as the filmmakers seem to know the whole production is so ridiculous you’d take it the same way as being roasted by a stand-up comedian: It’s just all in good fun.
You could save the movie for Redbox night, but if you’ve already seen “Wonder Woman” already or care as little for the “Cars” series as some do, “47 Meters Down” is the best big-screen option until something else decent arrives during this lackluster blockbuster season. Just pay as little as you can to see it.
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“47 Meters Down” is currently playing at the Riverside Cinemas, 1017 S. Boone St. in Aberdeen.
George Haerle holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing for media and lives in Cosmopolis.
