Overview
Reunited at an exotic destination wedding, five girlfriends decide to rent a boat to spend a day together along the paradise-like coast. Their friendship is put to the ultimate test when they find themselves stranded in open water fighting for their lives against sharks and mother nature as they desperately try to survive.
A year after a homophobic attack that left one of the couple, Meg, unconscious, and left mental scars that resulted in the pair splitting up, the pair are reunited when they travel to the West Indies to celebrate the wedding of one of their mutual friends, Lizzie, a bridezilla who wants her big event to be perfect. One of the wedding party organises a surprise boat ride out to a secluded island for the five of them, dropping Meg and her ex, Kayla off first to try to force them back together. When they all reunite on the secluded beach, terror strikes when one of the group, Ruth, is savagely bitten by a shark. Getting back on the boat, the group speed back to mainland, but the craft colides with some jutting reef and swiftly sinks, leaving the group stranded in the middle of the sea, with the sharks posing an ever present threat.
Aside from the assault trauma backstory, this is a film that is all too familiar, offering nothing of note that makes it stand out from similar films such as Open Water, or The Shallows. In fact, it pales in comparison with those film, struggling to make us care for the group – that backstory appears to be inconsequential to anything that follows, and doesn’t really add anything of note or importance. What plays out is simply a tick box exercise as we wait to see how many of the group get attacked one by one, whilst waiting for the last minute rescue that will inevitably come.
This isn’t a bad film, and indeed the shark attacks are well handled, with some gruesome effects at times, but mostly unseen terror beneath the surface. But neither is is a good film, and pretty much within minutes of it ending, most of what happened will be entirely forgotten. It is just bland and derivative of other films from the genre, one which has pretty much played out every variation of over the year, and having a group of characters that it is hard to care for maked it struggle to stop me rooting for the shark. Put bluntly, this is a film that just treads water.