Lisa (Mandy Moore, Tangled) has just been dumped by her long-time boyfriend and has decided to join her adventurous sister, Kate (Claire Holt, The Originals, The Vampire Diaries), in Mexico for a much needed vacation. When a pair of local boys convince them to go on a shark-diving voyage, Kate thinks it will be just the thing to show Lisa's ex that she isn't as much of a stick-in-the-mud as he thought she was.
As you might expect, after being lowered into the water inside the shark cage for only a few minutes, something goes wrong with the boat's winch and the cage drops from 5 meters to 47, and the pre-chummed waters mean that the sharks are already agitated and hunting the area for their next meal.
On the ocean bottom, the girls find themselves out of radio range with the boat, which means that every time they want to contact the surface, one of them has to leave the safety of the cage and swim up several meters. Each trip out of the safety of the cage is perilous and the girls have to be careful. Unfortunately, it seems that each plan the crew comes up with ends up running into one problem or another, the least of which are the sharks circling the cage.
In the Deep does a good job of drawing out the tension and suspense of the situation. Between the teeth-filled menace outside the cage and the constant reminder that there is a limited supply of air, you can feel like the girls are in real danger. Unfortunately, I found that I never really connected with the characters and never found myself so invested in them that I cared if they got injured or killed. The acting wasn't bad, as both Moore and Holt did well in their parts, but a movie like this really hangs on those two characters and I just never really felt too strongly one way or the other.
So, while In the Deep isn't a bad thriller, it isn't exceptional either. This is a rental at best, and even then I wouldn't put it at the top of the must-see list.
