Summer Shark Movie
“Good gosh,” we think as we watch 47 Meters Down, “we need those sharks and we need ‘em fast.”
Thumping dance music from a cheap nightclub in Cabo is pounding through the theater speakers.
And two sisters on a trip south of the border are doing shots and dancing with the kind of easy abandon that only fictional personalities can muster.
The sisters are Lisa (Mandy Moore) and her sister Katie (Claire Holt), on vacation in Mejico after Lisa’s boyfriend gives her the ol’ hasta luego. She’s too boring for him, we are told, rather conveniently, in a line that we might have dismissed as filler were it not used, again and again, as a plot device to overcome Lisa’s prudent nature.
Enter a few handsome locals, a rusty shark tank, and a boat that looks like a floating EPA violation. Do you even need more of this review?
Well, since we’re here…
Nursing her heartbreak, noble-hearted girl that she is, Lisa had planned to stay in and sip chardonnay. But Katie convinces her to – you guessed it – come do shots with local guys and oh my goodness if it isn’t, like literally, the best night of their lives.
But the following morning does not find the sisters sporting oversized sunglasses, sipping mimosas, and saying things like “oh my god, and did you see that guy last night?” and “Oh my god, you bitch!”
Instead, their newfound gentleman companions propose a light morning of shark diving. “Gee, I don’t know about this,” says Lisa. “A boring person would never go shark diving,” counters Katie. And it's off to the races! Good thing the writer thought to punch in the line about being boring. Otherwise, we might have stayed at sea level.
Instead, as promised, the girls wind up stuck at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by great whites, and running low on oxygen.
It has been remarked by critics that in superhero movies, the more villains there are, the worse the movie. Cabin in the Woods aside, the same is undoubtedly true for horror. If sharks are fearsome enough to get an audience into the theater, what can low oxygen, nitrogen narcosis, and decompression sickness (AKA “the bends”) do but distract from the main attraction? The plot zigs and zags from one terror to the next – whatever the filmmakers need to keep it all moving. Sadly, the great white sharks, once marquee villains with a character and logic all their own, are relegated to mindless deus ex murder machines.
Still, we will not deny that these various terrors brought us to the edge of our seats here and there.
What sunk the movie was, of all the things, the sound.
You can’t just put microphones in the water to record dialogue. So when 95% of your movie is set underwater, you need to dub all the audio in a production studio in Burbank, California. Done correctly, the sound designer gets an Oscar. Done incorrectly, you get a badly acted podcast with Mandy Moore exclaiming, every few minutes, “oh no, I’m going to run out of air!” Yes, we are aware that you can't breathe water. But at the 70 minute mark, we might have been tempted to watch everyone involved give it the ol’ college try.