The 5 best, bloodiest shark attacks in '47 Meters Down: Uncaged' (spoilers!)
Beware: Shark spoilers ahead for "47 Meters Down: Uncaged." Stop reading now if you want to see the bloody moments first.
A shark thriller is only as good as its shark attacks.
Based on this formula, "47 Meters Down: Uncaged" (now showing) bloody succeeds in its wildly implausible tale of four young girls – Mia (Sophie Nélisse), Sasha (Corinne Foxx), Nicole (Sistine Rose Stallone) and Alexa (Brianne Tju) – pursued by the hungry apex predators. Naturally, it all goes down in a Mexican cave filled with Mayan ruins.
Yes, the killer sharks have adapted to life in darkness (blind, but with enhanced hearing), while retaining those big teeth. Nature needs big teeth.
** Seriously, this is your last warning. **
Here are the top five killer shark moments in "Uncaged":
5. Ben and Carl are solid shark appetizers
Ben (Davi Santos) and Carl (Khylin Rhambo) are competent divers and crew. They have to be dispatched quickly, shark appetizers before the main course.
Ben swims up all confident to save the four trapped girls lost in the cave. He's even joking underwater. Until he gets blindsided.
"He was monologue-ing, which you really shouldn't do in shark waters," says writer/director Johannes Roberts.
Carl is welding underwater, blasting heavy metal music when a shark sneaks up behind him. Most of the gore is off-screen, except for the screams. But bonus for having Carl's head float out later.
4. Alexa gets really carried away in current events
A panicky Alexa is inhaled by a shark, escapes, but loses her mask as she swims away from her nemesis. She then gets caught up in ridiculously strong water currents. Roberts added the scene to amp up Alexa's juicy, final drama and highlight the horrors of cave diving.
It worked.
Tju performs Oscar-worthy current drowning right down to the final, fateful arm wave. "It’s a little dark," Roberts says. "But she was amazing, so it's awful to watch."
3. Sasha opens the door for a hero
Sasha's shark attack comes when it appears she'll escape to a tourist boat with her formerly estranged stepsister Mia. The final blitz is surprising and the sight of Sasha in the swimming shark's mouth is priceless. It gives Mia a chance to get all Rambo, grab a flare gun from the boat, and plunge into the water to save her new BFF.
Roberts says the flare-gun action was a late addition. The shark sets Sasha free and her wounded emergence from the water to the boat is the movie's bloodiest scene.
2. John Corbett proves that shark movies are no place for a positive attitude
Full disclosure: Corbett's diver-dad Grant gets a bump here since the shark onslaught happens to, well, John Corbett. The nicest, chillest guy in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Northern Exposure." Perfect chumming.
Grant tries to push positivity amid the death and panic. He tells the girls they can swim to safety! As the words, "I believe in you" come out of his mouth, Grant is engulfed by the shark's jaws and pulled under, screaming.
"You really shouldn't say anything positive until you're safely on a boat," Roberts says. "But John really, really loved his shark death."
1. Nicole's demise would make Hans Gruber proud
Stallone proves she's her action-superstar father Sylvester's daughter in her very first movie. In the opening scene, she leaps fearlessly off a cliff into the water – and that's actually her, not a stuntwoman ("And it was no baby cliff").
But Nicole (Stallone) turns coward, jumping onto an ascender as Alexa is pulling herself to safety. Nicole scrambles over her best friend to save herself, but the ascender pulls out of the rocks, sending her into a full Hans Gruber, slow-motion fall into shark-filled waters. Then she gets ripped in half by two sharks.
"It's epic," Stallone says. "I wouldn’t want to die in a shark film any other way."
'Uncaged' star Sistine Stallone: When my dad Sylvester Stallone literally pushed me into shark-filled waters
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: '47 Meters Down: Uncaged': The 5 bloodiest shark attacks (spoilers!)
