Anyone who’s been paying close attention to the changing face of horror in the 21st century should hopefully be well aware of filmmaker Johannes Roberts. In some respects the British writer-director always seems to be just one big film away from really breaking through into the popular consciousness, yet at the same time he’s quietly built up a body of work that any genre filmmaker would be proud of: high school hoodie horror F, alien attack flick Storage 24, supernatural chiller The Other Side of the Door and more besides, and he looks poised to go bigger than ever with his upcoming Resident Evil reboot (yes, already).
Yet it would seem that, to date, Roberts made his biggest splash (water-based pun intended) with 2016’s 47 Metres Down, a shark attack shocker which had the slight misfortune of opening back-to-back with the similarly-themed The Shallows, which I felt it rather paled in comparison to. This being the case, I can’t pretend I was massively optimistic when hearing that Roberts had made a sequel, particularly given the bulk of the publicity surrounded what seemed like the novelty casting of two actresses with famous dads: Corrine Foxx, daughter of Oscar-winner Jamie, and Sistine Stallone, daughter of the one and only Sly. Happily, 47 Metres Down: Uncaged proves considerably more satisfying than its predecessor in almost every respect, even though I once again can’t help feeling more could have been done with it.
First off, even though it’s the work of the same writer-director, 47 Metres Down: Uncaged is very much a standalone movie (and I do find myself wondering if it might have been better served to be treated as such, and given a more distinctive title in the process). The setting’s different, the characters are different, so that just leaves one key common element: sharks. But where 47 Metres Down saw two sisters in a touristy shark cage trapped at the bottom of the sea, the sequel boasts a considerably more compelling premise. The action centres on Sasha (Foxx) and Mia (Sophie Nélisse), step-sisters who’ve not long since been brought together, living in sunny Mexico with their underwater engineer father who’s working in tunnels when he and his team discover the entrance to a remarkable archaeological find: a submerged Mayan city, deep beneath where the modern city stands.
Sasha’s a confident girl, with two close friends in Nicole (Stallone) and Alexa (Brianne Tju), but Mia is insecure, bullied and friendless. Forced by their parents to spend time together at the weekend, circumstances see the sisters and Sasha’s friends head out to a remote jungle pool which happens to be the entrance to the sunken Mayan ruins. Unable to resist the temptation, the girls gear up and scuba dive down there to explore the site for themselves; but once they make it, they discover to their horror that they’re not alone. Much as the ruins play host to little-seen fish which have evolved without eyesight to live in the dark, they are also home to a unique breed of blind great white shark, which doesn’t need to see in order to feed on its prey.
That’s right: this is essentially The Descent underwater. I neither know nor care how scientifically plausible any of it is, but it’s a terrific hook for a suspenseful creature feature, and the undersea ruins setting adds a hint of old-fashioned adventure; a format I would be tempted to describe as ‘boy’s own,’ but that would be somewhat inappropriate given, like The Descent, the central ensemble are all female. There’s a whole lot here to be impressed with: shooting such a movie almost entirely underwater presents significant challenges, not least given that the faces of the actors are almost entirely obscured by scuba masks for most of the key sequences. The reported budget was a mere $12 million – very small fry by modern Hollywood standards – so it’s quite something that they produced a film so visually impressive, with such a sense of scale. Perhaps most importantly, the shark looks terrific, and a lot of the time entirely realistic.
All that having been said, 47 Metres Down: Uncaged does leave a fair bit to be desired in other areas. To continue with The Descent comparisons, a common complaint of Neil Marshall’s 2005 film is that once the underground action gets going, viewers struggle to remember who’s who (this isn’t something I personally ever had any trouble with, but I guess I can see why it would give some viewers difficulty). This is a problem which is very much in evidence in 47 Metres Down: Uncaged, as the teen protagonists are quite thinly drawn, and – again, particularly once the scuba masks are on – distinguishing them from one another proves challenging. This is a particular problem as the dialogue is for the most part extremely generic, all the cries of “come on, this way” blurring in no time at all. It’s definitely a problem that we have modern high school girls as written by a pair of fortysomething men (Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera), and the characterisations ring pretty hollow; it probably doesn’t help that we have some bizarrely anachronistic soundtrack choices (Aztec Camera? Roxette? Status bleeding Quo?!), which only further dilutes any sense of authenticity. It does rather leave one wondering if the premise would have been better served with adult protagonists rather than teens.
But there, as the Bard put it, is the rub: like its predecessor, 47 Metres Down: Uncaged is geared specifically toward the PG-13 market, and as a result it’s never able to get anywhere as intense as the premise might suggest, with bloodshed and swearing kept to a minimum. Now, I’m by no means entirely opposed to comparatively family-friendly horror, I don’t believe horror movies need gore and profanity by the bucketload in order to work, and of course I’m well aware that Jaws became the definitive shark movie with, initially, a PG attached. However, this is one instance when I do believe turning up the intensity would have helped, as too often the stakes just don’t feel high enough; only so many times can you see a shark pass by a potential victim with nary a graze, before you stop feeling so concerned for said potential victim.
Even so, as creature feature survivalist shockers go, 47 Metres Down: Uncaged isn’t a bad one at all. It’s nice to look at, it’s definitely tense in places, and gets agreeably bananas once we reach the final reel. And even though things never get quite as full-on as gorehounds might have liked, if the combination of deep water, small dark spaces and big sharp teeth never gets to you at all, you must be made of pretty strong stuff.
47 Metres Down: Uncaged is released to UK DVD and download on 3rd February, from Altitude.