Review - 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Written by: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Sophie Nelisse, Corinne Foxx, Brianne Tju, Sistine Stallone
IMDb Link

I'm pretty indiscriminate when it comes to creature features, especially shark movies, so if you're like me and you're always up for a slightly trashy shark movie that's clearly seen a lot of other shark movies, you'll probably find this somewhat entertaining.

The movie is essentially The Descent, but worse and with sharks. Two step-sisters are having a hard time adjusting to one another in their new home in Mexico, so they escape with a couple of friends to a secret watering hole that has an ancient Mayan temple recently discovered beneath. The girls go to explore the temple, things gets claustrophobic, and one of them accidentally causes a collapse that traps them in the temple, so they have to explore further to find another way out, while discovering that they are in the territory of a breed of Great White Shark that has evolved to use sound over sight.

The story actually 'works' in the sense that it has a very on-the-nose setup and obvious theme: the sisters aren't getting along (each of them very pointedly says "she's not my sister" within the first ten minutes of the movie) so they have to learn to work together to survive. It's also surprisingly coherent with the first movie's focus on sisterhood as an inalienable bond. Unfortunately, little else is developed, with characters so shallow they can't even be called archetypes; even the one that's supposed to be aggressively unlikable due to their selfishness doesn't have any real energy to her. I'm not asking for much, but you'd think a film that so aggressively pulls ideas from The Descent would also try the whole "likable and sympathetic characters" thing a little harder instead of gratuitously using slow-motion to pad out the running time like a Zack Snyder film. But I digress, this is a shark movie, so I'll talk about the horror.

There's exactly one scare in this movie that's absolutely masterful in its craft. Shortly after one of the girls knocks over a large pillar and causes a massive flood of silt in the water, blinding everyone and cutting off their radio connections. We're stuck alone with the main character, who turns about frantically as she looks for her friends and fumbles with her light. As it flashes around in the water, it shines behind her, and for the briefest moment of complete silence, we see the blind shark pass by. It's an absolutely chilling moment that carries with it no fanfare, and just let's you sit with the knowledge of the horror that could be befall her, as she continues to struggle and search. The tension is set and held when she finds a couple of her friends, now she thinks she's safe, and that dissonance with what the audience knows is exactly the sort nail-biting horror that elevates these sort of films, even as the poor writing highlights who's going to die by how little time has actually been spent developing them. This one moment, the follow-up, and the eventual release of the earned jump-scare is better than everything else in the movie by a mile, even the scene that lifts its ideas directly from The Land Before Time V (seriously; I wish I could find the scene to draw a comparison). The rest of the time this movie goes for horror it quickly gets repetitive, to the point that many of the shots feel exactly the same as the girls scramble from one tunnel the shark is too big to swim through to another, and the impact the sounds these girls make have on the sharks become more and more inconsistent.

The Short Version: Uncaged reaches all the way up to the lofty heights of slightly better than the original. It's contrived but functional, cliche but genre-savvy, and its few excellent scares are drowned out by repetition.

Rating: 5/10