Let’s be disappointed.
I can’t think of another genre other than horror that can crap the bed as quickly with terrible characters. The trend of not caring about characters in horror simply has to stop. Characters are potentially more important to the horror genre than the scares (I know that sounds weird). If the audience doesn’t give a shit about the characters, none of what follows matters.
We follow Mia, who is bullied for unknown reasons—seriously. They cast an attractive young woman (because of course they did) and decided to make her unpopular and scorned by the “pretty” girls. Mia has a stepsister (I think, this isn’t ever fully explained) Sasha, who is popular. After a tooth pulling introduction, Sasha and her two interchangeable friends take Mia along and go diving in some Aztec ruins. I wanted to rag on the introduction more, but nothing interesting happens. It is just scenes of unlikable people being unlikable.
The best things about this film is the ruins. The look cool and the set design is nice. That is the only thing that I can give a positive remark on. Everything else just sucks.
Trapped in the ruins are two blind great white sharks. They evolved to be blind. Apparently, this film doesn’t know how evolution works. I can’t believe this film wasn’t called out on this crap (maybe it was, but you’d think such a stupid blunder would be more known). So, sharks evolve in hours, I guess.
Just about every scary scene only exists due to the sheer and unbridled stupidity of our characters. Basically, if you watch this film, you’re going to listen to four women scream uncontrollable for about an hour. We also get leering shots of teenagers’ asses, which is just so fucking classy. I was shocked to see this was directed by the same guy who did the competent (albeit cliched) first entry of this series.
The stupidity of the characters destroys this film. However, it didn’t need that much help. We have repeated tricks used in the first one that now feel like a stale imitation. We get weird time lapses in the film. Their tanks go from 100% to 40% in less time than they go from 40% to 20%. This might seem nit-picky, but everything feels so manufactured that the film is more of a visual and aural irritant than a horror film.
I do suppose if you watch this, you’ll be treated to dumbest use of slow motion in film perhaps ever.
This is a void of filmmaking. Shame on the creators for pumping out such a tired and wet turd. Also, shame the writers for making such horrible characters. Whenever someone is killed, I was glad that there would less screaming, and that was the closest thing to an emotional response this film will get from you.
I have no jokes here. This is just pathetic and lazy. No matter how bad you think a forced sequel could be, this is worse. Watch Crawl instead. Avoid this one at all costs.
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