Sequel-itis strikes a reasonably competent 47 Meters Down, made by Johannes Roberts in 2017. Two years later he makes another underwater adventure-horror movie by tagging Uncaged to the title — a film that has no real reason to exist, but that somebody greenlit it.
Steven Spielberg had already proved to the movie going world that sharks were terrifying, with his 1975 film, Jaws and its many sequels. Anyone going into the sea and encountering one of these killers will, in all probability, end up maimed or dead — that’s a no-brainer. Set a sightless shark loose in an underwater space and throw some teens into the churn, and there will be enough scares to go. The sequel may not have characters in common, but the plot is quite similar.
The teen protagonists are all students at an international school in Mexico; two of them are step-sisters, with Grant (John Corbett), an archaeologist, and his wife Jennifer (Nia Long) as parents. Grant’s daughter Mia (Sophie Nelisse) and Jennifer’s Sasha (Corinne Foxx — Jamie Foxx’s daughter), are not the best of friends.
When Grant gets busy with urgent work involving exploration of an underground Mayan burial city with his assistants Ben (Davi Santos) and Carl (Khylin Rhambo), the girls are sent to join a shark-watching trip on a glass-bottomed boat. But they skip it when they see the school’s mean girl Catherine (Brec Bassinger), and join up with two of Sasha’s friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Rose — Sylvester Stallone’s daughter), to go off to a remote, ‘secret’ swimming spot, which is connected to Grant’s archaeological site.
The girls pick up scuba diving gear and plan a quick look see, and, of course, invite danger. They end up disturbing the site and unleashing a great albino shark. The entrance to the underwater tunnel collapses, trapping the girls inside. There is much screaming and thrashing about, and the very real risk of the oxygen tanks getting depleted.
The claustrophobia of being stuck in underwater caves, plus the carnage caused by sharks gets quite harrowing after a while; if the point of it all was to get the two step-sisters to get over their hostility, perhaps a family picnic would have done the job. Which is not to say that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is not well mounted or suspenseful, it’s just that there a killer shark franchise does not seem like a palatable idea.
