47 Meters Down: Uncaged Review

Our yearly shark movie has arrived! This has been a rather fun tradition for me as I've come to really enjoy my dumb shark movies. In fact, some friends and I have become a bit obsessed with them recently. It's a story that has a bit of a sad beginning, though, as I excitedly showed them "2001: A Space Odyssey" in honor of its 50th anniversary and they hated it. To counteract that, a decision was made to watch "Sharknado" next. But not only did we do that, over the course of an entire summer, we watched ALL of the "Sharknado" movies. I can't remember the exact timeline of all of this, but in the midst of this, Hollywood got on a bit of a shark kick, releasing "The Shallows" in 2016, "47 Meters Down" in 2017 and "The Meg" in 2018. Sure, shark movies have been popular since "Jaws" revolutionized cinema in 1975, but this subgenre of horror has had a bit of a resurgence of late and it's been exciting. This summer I feel extra spoiled because, although it's not a shark movie, we had "Crawl" in July. And that's pretty much the same thing, but with alligators instead of sharks. So if we broaden the conversation and talk about terror in the water, it all fits into one big happy family of horror. After "Crawl" was extremely entertaining, I was ready for my second dose.

But first, before I dive into the movie, I want to talk box office because, you know, numbers are my thing. Out of all the three recent shark movies we've had, you might be wondering why "47 Meters Down" is the one that first got a sequel when "The Shallows" made $55 million domestically and $119 million worldwide while "The Meg" made $145 million domestically and $530 million worldwide, yet "47 Meters" down made only $44.3 million domestically and didn't have a worldwide release. Now I suppose that $44.3 million is fairly close to "The Shallows," and is more impressive when you consider it opened to just $11.2 million compared to the $16.8 million of "The Shallows." But the answer to this is budget. "The Meg" made a crapton of money, but also cost $130 million. "The Shallows" was pretty well off as it cost only $17 million, but "47 Meters Down" cost a mere $5 million, which for Hollywood standards is chump change. With a budget that low, justifying a sequel is a lot easier. That's also why "47 Meters Down: Uncaged" wasn't a failure this past weekend, despite only opening to $8.4 million. Sure, they were probably hoping for a bit more after boosting the budget all the way up $12 million, but they will still end up getting a return on their investment.

The other reason why it was easier to make a "47 Meters Down" sequel is that of the three of them, that's the one that more easily lent itself to a sequel because it wasn't tied down to characters or premise. "The Shallows" was specifically tied down to Blake Lively's character and what she went through while "The Meg" was about Jason Statham fighting a megaladon. A sequel to either would have to include those characters and find a way to at least attempt a logical next step with them. "47 Meters Down" was just about two girls trapped in the ocean while getting surrounded by sharks. Even if we ignore spoilers of how that movie turned out, bringing back the same characters for a sequel isn't necessary because those characters aren't really what made the movie interesting and fun. It was the sharks. So the idea of them getting a bunch of nobodies together for a quick sequel that has zero connection to the first is something they can get away with. And that's exactly what they've done. "Uncaged," as I will now refer to it, has nothing to do with "47 Meters Down." In fact, it also has nothing to do with the specific distance of 47 meters, which is why naming this "48 Meters Down" would've been a bit silly because "47 Meters Down" is pure branding at this point.

The basic premise of this movie is that four teenage girls go off a little adventure to some underwater caves and get chased around by sharks. That's all that really needed to happen here, but I think this movie's biggest issue is that it tried to be more complex. Of the four teenagers, Mia and Sasha are step sisters. Mia's dad and Sasha's mom recently got married and now they're trying to make this new family work. But Sasha for some reason doesn't get along too well with Mia and has no interest in even calling Mia her sister. On top of that, Mia, despite being a beautiful, smart, nice girl, gets bullied at her new school by a group of annoying teenage girls. Why does Sasha not like Mia? Why does Mia get bullied? I actually don't know. They're just empty hollow things that don't make sense. I didn't understand the motivations. I didn't buy all of the drama. In fact, it was all a really annoying distraction when I just wanted to get to the sharks. Sure, it's good to have good characters and emotional arcs. That can make a terror in the water movie more intense, like "Crawl" earlier this summer. But when the screenplay is just so terrible and the fairly inexperienced actors that were brought don't do a good enough job selling it, things become a disaster really quickly.

Thus as we got going in this movie, I was getting the feeling that perhaps I was a little too overly excited for this movie. Perhaps I was also forcing myself to like this movie because I tried to get pumped, but it was all superficial excitement. I didn't know if I really cared about any of the characters. I certainly didn't care about any of the drama. Then when the shark first showed up, I tried to be excited, but I wasn't. The only bit of emotion that came to me was the four girls went to this ancient Mayan underwater ruins and accidentally destroyed the whole thing. It was rather heartbreaking that such a cool historical site was all ruined and I was sad. Maybe at this point it would've been appropriate for our shark to be a vengeful Mayan guardian who decided to hunt and kill all these girls as a punishment for destroying the ruins. Or maybe the spirit of the Mayans themselves should've possessed all the sharks and chased after these girls. That would've been exciting. But no, that's not what happens. Instead, these girls are trapped and their oxygen tanks are running out, so they're trying to figure out how exactly they're going to get out of this since their exit is now blocked off, which isn't helped by the fact that they now know a shark is lurking around, causing panic levels to rise.

It was at this point when I was trying to force myself to be interested in this thing that the movie became comparable to an actual shark attack. You're casually swimming around the ocean, minding your own business, when all of a sudden... BOOM! A shark grabs you and pulls you under. That's how I felt, anyways. Because this movie came out of nowhere to suddenly become extremely intense. There was a jump scare that actually got me. I felt rather embarrassed and thus a bit relieved that I was watching this by myself so that my friends wouldn't laugh at me because I'm usually quite thick-skinned when it comes to jump scares. But this one got me. The shark snapped out of nowhere and had me on edge. From that point on, Johannes Roberts has a lot of fun with this movie. The acting budget may not have been very high and the screenplay probably went through nothing more than a quickly thrown together first draft, but it felt like they put over 90 percent of their $12 million budget all on these sharks and shark sequences. That's certainly where all the directing effort when into. The sharks here that are terrorizing these girls are blind cave sharks and they looked menacing. They're also given plenty of red coats to chow down on beforehand.

This is where if you have the right mindset, this movie will be a blast. If all you care about is watching sharks chase people and you want well-crafted shark scenes, this gives you exactly what you expect. Thus on a shark movie scale where one extreme is "Jaws" and the other extreme is "Sharknado," this movie leans more towards the "Sharknado" end of the spectrum and I feel that it's very self-aware of that. It's not really trying to be a serious movie as they only halfheartedly set up a story and a cast of characters, but things get bonkers really quick and I was rather amused. There were also plenty of moments where I was curled up in my chair as the horror sequences were well crafted. It's way more than a series of jump scares. The first jump scare got me. If the rest of the movie was just an endless string of jump scares, I would've grown rather tired of that, but Johannes Roberts plays around with a lot of different horror elements, mixing and matching to keep things fresh and keep me on edge. It's also apparent based on this and the first movie that he loves his bait and switch. That happens rather effectively in the first movie. This movie he has a lot of fun with that with a ton of bait and switch moments, especially in the final act, which was extremely entertaining.

I wasn't going to mention the cast of this movie because none of them really stand out, but then I learned after the fact that Sylvester Stallone's daughter is in the movie, as is Jamie Foxx's daughter. That's Sistine Stallone and Corinne Foxx. Both of them were in their feature film debuts. That was fun to learn. Do they have a future in film following this movie? Well, I don't know. Maybe. They probably have the pedigrees to get a good jump start on their acting careers, but eventually they need to bring a bit more to the table. Sistine Stallone played one of the annoying friends always making the dumb decisions. If that's what they told her to do, then she did her job effectively. But she wasn't a very good character. Corinne Foxx, on the other hand, plays one of our main two sisters, that of Sasha. And she does a good enough job to make me believe that she could have a good career if she was put in better movies where story and characters meant something. I hope she doesn't get relegated to entertaining B-movies. However, the real star of this is Sophie Nélisse, who plays our main character of Mia. She does a good job in this and it shows that she's the one with the acting background, having starred in "The Book Thief" and "Pawn Sacrifice," two really good indie films. 

Ultimately, though, your enjoyment of this movie will rely on two things. First, did you like the first movie? That has like a 55 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, so it was split right down the middle in terms of critics reaction and audience reaction was about the same. I really enjoyed the first movie, so I found myself enjoying this one. Second, can you sit back and enjoy a dumb shark movie? Does your shark movie need to be on the level of "Jaws," with great characters, great themes, and great development along with well set-up shark moments? Or can you also enjoy a "Sharknado" style of film where the acting is bad, the story is subpar, nothing makes sense, but the shark sequences are absurdly entertaining and thus enough to make for a fun film? If the latter is the case, then I suggest you give "Uncaged" a chance. I'm not saying you have to run out to see it in theaters, although with quantity superseding quality at the moment with our August and September release schedule, it's certainly not a bad option for a $5 Tuesday or something like that. But when this comes to a streaming platform or you're at a Redbox trying to figure out what to rent, this is a great option. I can't say this is a great movie, or even a good one, but I was entertained, so I'm giving it a 7/10.