47 Meters Down: Uncaged Parent Guide

Mia (Sophie Nélisse) and her stepsister Sasha (Corrine Foxx) are struggling to get along after moving to Mexico with their father, Grant (John Corbett), for his archaeological work. Grant decides to set them up together on a glass-bottomed-boat shark-seeing tour, in the hopes that the girls will bond. Instead, Sasha talks Mia into coming out with two of her friends to go swimming near the secret cave entrance to a sunken Mayan ruin…

I have a soft spot for ocean-based monster movies. One of the first reviews I wrote for this site, in fact, was for The Meg, which I enjoyed enough to see twice. I knew from the trailer this was probably not going to be as much fun, but I still went in with some hope. That was my first mistake. Never go into a screening feeling optimistic - it’s the best way to curse the next ninety minutes of your life.

There are a lot of problems with this movie. First, the writing is so poor that Nicole is basically the only one of the four girls who has a distinct character. She’s so phenomenally stupid that she becomes the cause of almost every problem in the first two acts of the movie. It’s not a good thing when your audience is rooting for at least one of your characters to get eaten before they’ve even seen a shark.

My other big issue was the creepy voyeuristic treatment of the female leads. The movie has a solid five-minute scene which is comprised solely of slow-motion shots of the main characters in bikinis, jumping in the water and tanning on a float. I started wondering if the theater’s projectionist had mistakenly mixed in a reel from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. This is especially problematic given that all four of the girls are in high school – they are minors; not adult women. I’m not faulting the movie for having its characters wear bikinis, which is reasonable swimwear in the heat of Mexico (although some parents might object). What I am criticizing is the movie gawping at the girls like some sweaty, heavily-breathing creep who’s parked outside freshman English with a telephoto lens. I don’t appreciate being made complicit in the general sliminess by watching the film.

Aside from the Swimsuit Edition problem, there’s actually very little for parents to be worried about. There are the expected “blood in the water” moments but the movie is less graphically gory than in other films of the “shark attack” genre, and there is almost no profanity, drug use, or explicit content. But while you could do worse for content, you could do a whole lot better for quality and entertainment value.