NEEDS A LITTLE MORE BITE
It’s got blood, bikinis and buckets of tension but this summer shark-fest...
47 Metres Down
Cert: 15 1hr 29mins
Da-da: long pause. Come on, you know what’s coming next. Da-da: another long pause. Let’s be honest, we all know what’s coming next, that’s all part of the summertime fun, right? Da-da, da-da, dada, da-da… Pause… Munch!
Yes, just when, deep down, we knew it wasn’t remotely safe to go back in the water because the annual horror of the summer shark film would be along any moment, here it is. I don’t know about you but I’ve barely recovered from last year’s blood-fest, The
Shallows, with Blake Lively. Yes, the one that starts off looking like a shampoo commercial and then…
It took $120m at the global box office, which, given that it cost less than $20m to make, is good business and probably explains not only why this Johannes Roberts-directed picture has arrived barely 12 months later but why it’s been backed by, among others, those canny cinematic operators Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Never mind that it’s now 42 years since Jaws was released, they know that, come the summer holidays, there’s still good box office in sharks.
We all know the key ingredients – the misleadingly idyllic-looking opening, the camera lingering on something that will later turn out to be key, the false alarms, the pivotal accident… but most of all it comes down to sustained tension. And that’s certainly what Roberts delivers here. It doesn’t seem to matter that we could all take a good guess at the likely story arc or that, in this particular instance, the plot of
Gravity seems to have been something of an inspiration, getting there is still as exhausting as ever.
In recent years we’ve had divers getting left behind by their boat (Open Water), swimmers being unable to get back on to their yacht (Adrift) and pretty blondes not noticing they are the only surfer left on a remote beach just as a Great White gets peckish (The Shallows). So quite a lot of marks for Roberts, who co-writes as well as directs, for this halfway original tale of two sisters travelling to Mexico (one nursing a broken heart, of course) meeting up with a couple of handsome local lads who happen to know a man with a boat and, er, a shark cage. Astonishingly and somewhat depressingly, the man with the boat – a modest part at best – is played by Matthew Modine. Goodness, doesn’t Memphis Belle, let alone Full Metal Jacket, seem a long time ago now? Apart from being very well made, The Shallows was lucky – it got Lively just as she took another big step up the career and celebrity ladder. The makers of 47 Metres Down are less fortunate – employing singer-turnedactress Mandy Moore, perhaps best known cinematically as the voice of Rapunzel in Tangled, and the little-known Australian actress Claire Holt to play Lisa and Kate. To be honest, once the scuba masks go on and the action moves underwater, they could have employed pretty much anyone. Here it’s the story, and the underwater setting, that are the stars. For surely to nobody’s great surprise, given the film’s title,
shortly after the cage has been submerged – the words of Captain Tony (Modine) still ringing in their ears: ‘Relax, you are going to have the time of your life, I promise’ – the rusty cable suspending the cage snaps. Down, down, down they go.
And that’s basically where the film proper begins – 47m down, trapped on the sea floor, bleeding (naturally, it’s a shark film; someone always has to be bleeding) and running out of air. But there has to be a twist – something that places them in ever greater danger – and here it’s a slightly unexpected one. At that depth, their radios don’t work and they can’t call their support boat. One of them is going to have to somehow get out of the cage and swim to a higher depth just to make radio contact.
Just two problems: if she swims too high too fast, she’ll get the bends and die, and, if she gets out of the cage… well, that’s where the sharks are. Da-da: long pause. Roberts, a filmmaker with a penchant for a commercial chiller, does well here. I loved his early false alarms – the foot dangling casually off an airbed turns out to be in a swimming pool, not the sea, and the red fluid spilled in the water is wine, not blood – and he makes excellent use of the claustrophobic darkness at such depths. He also does a first-class job of exploiting that near-universal fear of ‘what lies beneath’. If you don’t have it already, you will after this.
But the screenplay has little of the inventiveness and ingenuity of The Shallows and the face masks and low light levels limit the potential for both acting and developing character. There were moments when I had no idea which sister was doing what.
Talking to themselves to keep their spirits up does inadvertently introduce a welcome touch of Finding Dory-like comedy – not so much ‘just keep swimming’ as ‘just keep breathing’ – and while I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the twist that undoubtedly works in the cinema, it does send you out into the street feeling a little cheated and short-changed. That said, I’m still not going back in the water.
‘Swim too high too fast and she’ll get the bends – that’s if the sharks don’t get her first’