Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars
Bottom Line: Starts out fairly effective. Ends up laughingly stupid.
The biggest question in my mind after watching this movie is: What is the shark horror movie equivalent of jumping the shark? Because this movie did it. Which is too bad, because up to that point, it was a fairly effective horror movie.
“Uncaged” takes place in the Yucatan where a bunch of teenage girls at an all-girls school decide to play hooky from a planned shark-watching tour and go to a remote swimming spot that one of the girls knows about. And apparently, there are no actual Mexicans living in the Yucatan because I don’t think this movie features a single one. Like not even in the background. Maybe this movie takes place in Donald Trump’s fever dreams where he’s conquered Mexico and caged them all. It certainly would explain a lot. Anyway, after a, thankfully, not terribly gratuitous T&A session of the teens frolicking in the water, they decide to take the scuba gear that is there and fits them perfectly even though it wasn’t meant for them and explore the Mayan underground burial city that has since been flooded with water. And there are blind Great White sharks there. The end.
Ok, not quite the end. There is actually some really good film making in the forward sections of this movie. I mean, of course, you have to accept that these giant sharks can swim around in all these caves that the scuba divers often have trouble navigating, but still. The camera makes great use of the claustrophobia of being underwater in caves and very effectively uses light and dark and silt and rocks to scare the bejeezus out of you as these impossibly large creatures pick the protagonists off morsel by tasty morsel.
John Corbett is in this film. I do not know why. But he very effectively gets Samuel L. Jacksoned out of this film (see “Deep Blue Sea”) and you should really stop watching it at that point. From then on, it’s a film of nonsense and incredulity as the remaining survivors are subjected to a series of sharks crashing into things just as they escape and magic currents that consistently push you down to the abyss below and getting chomped by sharks but somehow surviving. I will say, though, that whoever thought up the whole starting with hooky from a shark-watching tour and finishing up with the girls being ejected into the ocean right where the shark-watching tour boat was chumming the waters is a genius and should be our next President.