Review of 47 Meters Down (2017) by Nick C — 19 Jun 2017

This will never be called the scariest movie of the year, but is a serious contender for funniest movie of the year. Yes I'm being serious. This movie was hilarious! I found myself laughing almost every minute. Needless to say, that's not a good thing when the film doesn't want you to laugh. I'll get right to the point on this one. The film stars Mandy Moore and Claire Holt as two sisters vacationing in Mexico who decide to go in a shark cage, only for it to break and descend, you guessed it, 47 meters down. Cool premise, but does it deliver? Sort of.

There are a few thrills. A few cool sequences. A few moments of real fear and tension. Most of this is overridden though by how laughably cheesy the dialogue is. This is sort of a good thing if you're watching in a crowded theater where everyone can laugh at it and have a good time in its stupidity. If you've watching alone and looking for a real tension-builder, try something else.

The movie is very repetitive, in the sense that they literally duplicate a lot of their sequences. It also becomes tedious in its overlong exposition, and much time is spent wasting time rather than actually doing something or thrilling the audience in some way. I came to this movie to have fun. I wanted some thrills and some chills in the classic B-movie sense. Unfortunately, they were too far and few between.

There is a twist at the end of the film that I won't reveal here; I will only tell you that you can kind of see it coming. I could at least; it didn't catch me off-guard in the way that Life or Cars 3's endings did. But that aside, it is still a fairly cool and clever twist, if not for the fact that they literally go around it with a second ending! I hate that! If they had stuck with the twist they had, I would have actually given this movie three stars. It would have been chilling and haunting, even if it was somewhat predictable for me. But no, they cancel it out with the conventional ending we expect.

Still, if I'm judging this as someone who saw it in theaters with a large crowd, I would say it's a good time. The cheesy B-movie dialogue was funny in how stupid it was. If I'm judging this as a critic, I must accept that the funniness of this movie is unintentional, and I say it's terrible. Since it's not a comedy, laughing hysterically at it probably isn't a good thing, in addition to the fact that it is extremely uneven, incoherent, and not the least bit thrilling.. So, go see this movie with your friends and laugh at how bad it is. It's one of the worst films I've seen all year so far.

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Rating: 1.5/4.