Director: Gerald Rascionato
Year: 2017
Rated R
Rating: * 1/2 Stars
Cast: Joel Hogan, Josh Potthoff, Megan Peta Hill
Open Water 3: Cage Dive is my latest write-up. With its unmoved thrills kicking in after the fifty-minute-mark, "Cage Dive" contains incoherent/jittery found footage, an incorrigibly boring first half, some implausible coincidences, and some various Blair Witch Project overtones.
In all honesty, I got very perturbed watching "Cage Dive". I mean why does some Gen X in peril have to chronicle everything via a hand-held camera? There were times when I couldn't tell what the heck was going on with this worn out exercise in seizure cinema.
Anyway, the plot of Open Water 3: Cage Dive involves three Californians who venture to Australia to partake in a shark cage dive. When their boat is capsized by a random wave (in calm waters which makes no sense), they find themselves abandoned in the middle of the ocean. They bicker, lose their heads, and are left as procrastinating fish food for some hungry great whites.
Basically, "Cage Dive" has the same blueprint as the original Open Water film from 2003. The only difference is the occurrence of said wave, which looks and feels like the special effects department didn't want to take the effort to enhance or elaborate its destruction. The acting in Open Water 3: Cage Dive is decent and its closing shot is a little disturbing. However, "Cage Dive" fails to garner the gravity of tension and numbing fear demonstrated by its previous sequels (Open Water and Open Water 2: Adrift).
In retrospect, Open Water 3: Cage Dive feels like the boring stepchild to the more harrowing, 47 Meters Down (released in 2017 as well). It's obviously low budget, it's patronizing in its audience perception, and it comes off as tired in its forgone genesis. You don't root for its characters and you constantly wonder why the sharks haven't eaten them right off the bat. Oh yeah, if they're dead early on then there'd be nothing to fill "Cage Dive's" poky running time of eighty minutes.
Bottom line: Despite Open Water 3: Cage Dive being the only crappy installment in the Open Water series, the future of this franchise stills needs to be "closed" at this point. I mean what's next, getting stranded in the Dead Sea without perspicacity or the ability to float? Total nonsense. Rating: 1 and a half stars.
Written by Jesse Burleson
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