Metacritic reviews

There's plenty of atmosphere and awe, even if it's in the service of a story that starts rote and finds its sea legs only when half the divers have sunk their bones to Davy Jones.

It's a solid, old-fashioned action yarn filled with the very latest dive gear and the oldest plot formula in the movie-maker's playbook.

The key to enjoying Sanctum is to look, not listen.

Here and there an image of spectral beauty, assisted by the 3-D technology, floats into view and captures our imagination. But the script, which really should've been called "Sanctimonium," has a serious case of the bends.

A movie that wouldn't get much attention if the creator of "Titanic" and "Avatar" (as the ads overhype) weren't tangentially involved.

Banal dialogue, over-modulated performances and melodramatic scoring combine forces to sink the stirringly photographed proceedings quicker than that treacherous flash flood.

What it has instead is really bad acting set against often-stunning cave-wall backdrops and underwater action sequences.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

Ultimately, the plot-point overload dilutes any palpable sense of dread, excitement or empathy, and it doesn't help that all the dialogue acts in service to either patronizing exposition or turgid interpersonal drama.

Those audiences who have complained about the clunky exposition and mawkish emotional dialogue in Cameron's films will discover the "King of the World"'s own dramatic talents to be on par with the Bard in comparison to the shouty, over-emoted hokum on display here.