Bitten by a theme

47 Metres Down
Starring: Claire Holt, Mandy Moore, Matthew Modine
Director: Johannes Roberts
Genre: Survival Horror
Rating: 15+
Running Time: 85 Minutes

Summer and sharks have proven to be a pretty potent combination since Jaws practically invented the seasonal blockbuster 42 years ago.
The same winning partnership is again the main draw in 47 Metres Down, an old-fashioned B-movie that offers its share of reasonably effective thrills, even if it gets predictably light-headed long before it’s over.

Claire Holt and Mandy Moore play sisters Kate and Lisa respectively, who are just a couple of bachelorettes in paradise on a holiday in Mexico. Lisa, however, confesses that she’s just broken up with her boyfriend, prompting her more free-spirited sister to coax her to get out and live a little.

The two meet a couple of guys who talk them into a shark-cage excursion with a somewhat shady-looking captain (Matthew Modine). “It’s like going to the zoo, except you’re in the cage,” they’re assured.

Alas, something goes terribly wrong, and the sisters are left trapped at the ocean bottom, running low on air, with massive great whites in the water. Thanks to full-faced masks, the two can still communicate, although that’s as much a curse for the audience, given the quality of the screen-writing, as it is a boon for them.

For Holt and Moore, their roles are saddled with a lot of shrieking, panting and bad dialogue. Frankly, director Johannes Roberts would have benefited from devoting a little more of the movie’s 89-minute running time to introducing the characters, and a tad less to fabricating increasingly dumb and contrived ways to tease out the protagonists’ predicament, especially with the air in their tanks creating a built-in expiration point.

Problem one: 47 metres is seven metres too deep for the range of their transceivers, meaning that one of them will have to leave the (relative) safety of the cage in order to communicate with the boat.
Problem two: They’re both quickly running out of air, and heavy breathing due to panic isn’t helping.
Problem three: Anyone who dives down to assist them might be eaten by a shark, which tends to hamper the rescue process.
Problem four: Even if Lisa and Kate were prepared to risk becoming shark supper, they can’t swim to the surface quickly enough to avoid imminent oxygen depletion, as decompression sickness (better known as ‘the bends’) would then likely kill them.
While this seems like a thrilling, tension-fuelled array of set pieces, the fact that Modine’s character endlessly exposits the same information at least a dozen times gets tiresome fast. At one point, I was actively hoping one of the girls got ‘the bends’ so at least Modine could say “I told you so!” and at least shut up warning them about it.
Last summer, Blake Lively acquitted herself well in The Shallows, which emerged as one of the most pleasantly surprising films of last summer and offered something different. Here, though, Moore, is sunk by straight-to-video dialogue: “The shark almost got me!” she yells after the shark almost gets her; “I’m almost out of air,” she says as she runs out of air. Such declarations are quite literally wastes of breath, and the film might have been much improved by excising the dialogue from the underwater sequences.
The movie’s saving grace is the visceral response that sharks produce, even more than four decades after Jaws first had audiences screaming. It’s no accident that Discovery Channel’s Shark Week is an annual event; there’s just something fascinating about these menacing monsters.
For all the wrinkles and riffs in between, that sense of helplessness and isolation remains a powerful, tension-filled hook, even if Roberts has to jerk the audience around more than a bit to keep them dangling. As for the groan-inducing lines, for some those chuckles will simply provide a welcome breather.
Thanks to solid cinematography, the underwater scenes are at least compelling in their abyssal murkiness. Fluid camerawork glides through the water in such a way that we’re constantly on edge thinking a shark is just about to emerge from the depths, though Roberts relies on jump scares less than you might expect.
All told, 47 Metres Down delivers enough fundamental bait to justify this sort of low-budget exercise. It’s about as throwaway as summer popcorn fare gets, but fans of the genre might just about find something to enjoy. 
• Showing at: Cineco, Seef II, Saar, Al Jazira, Wadi Al Sail, Mukta A2.

Rating: 3/5