Mere months after poisoning movie theatres with his legendarily awful Strangers reboot trilogy, Renny Harlin is already back in theatres with Deep Water, a hybrid of a disaster flick and a creature feature. Shark-attack schlock is not particularly new territory for Harlin, as he most famously directed 1999’s so-dumb-it-is-kind-of-great Deep Blue Sea. To his credit, Deep Water is nowhere near as bad as his aforementioned trio of cinematic abominations. Deep Water is still not any good, but anything is better than rock bottom at that point.
Deep Water, not to be confused with the 2022 Ben Affleck erotic thriller of the same name, follows a commercial flight on its way from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Halfway through the flight, a lithium battery explodes and throws the plane into chaos, forcing it to crash-land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Around 30 of the more than 250 passengers and crew survive the crash and are scattered across the various parts of the wreckage. However, as bad as the crash was, the survivors have to wait for a potential rescue while surviving a bunch of very hungry mako sharks.
Our lead protagonist is Ben, played by Aaron Eckhart, the first captain who took the extra shift to avoid dealing with his family problems at home, namely his cancer-stricken son. He works under lead pilot Rich, played by Ben Kingsley, who avoids his own marital failings by serenading flight attendants with Sinatra tunes. The surviving passengers we also come to know are about as stock as stock characters can be. There is Cora, played by Molly Belle Wright, and Finn, played by Elijah Tamati, stepsiblings whose recently married parents spend most of the flight occupied in the “mile-high club.”
“Deep Water is still not any good, but anything is better than rock bottom at that point.”
There is also a pair of Chinese esports players, played by Xiaolei Yu and Bridget Ho, who secretly have feelings for each other, the obnoxious American sports bro, played by Lakota Johnson, who clashes with said players, and a nerd who chats with a sassy older woman, played by Kate Fitzpatrick, for guidance on wooing one of the flight attendants. Finally, there is Dan, played by Angus Sampson, a greaseball in human form who inadvertently causes the entire disaster to begin with when he sneaks his broken portable charger into his luggage.
The film attempts to give some characters a bit of pathos, and Eckhart, Kingsley and Wright do their best with the material given, but the script, a four-hander between writers Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause and Damien Power, has very little substance to begin with. Most of the survivors have one personality trait, and that is it. Hell, some of them do not have traits at all, they are just glorified extras. Sampson, best known for his appearances in the two recent Mad Max films, livens things up a little bit with his cartoonishly evil performance, but it is not enough to mask how dull the overall ensemble is.
“Ultimately, Deep Water is a forgettable straight-to-VOD film that somehow escaped containment into movie theatres.”
To give credit where it is due, the plane crash sequence itself is impressive. The battery explosion sets off a chain of events that escalate dramatically to pretty nerve-wracking effect. The fire causes an explosion in the cargo hold, leading to a hole in the hull and engine explosions, which send bodies flying both in and out of the plane. Think of it as an extended version of Final Destination’s iconic plane crash. Additionally, each mini-group of survivors having their own set of challenges based on where they were on the plane is conceptually interesting, like Finn’s group being trapped underwater and living off an air bubble.
However, the shark attacks themselves are just bland, with many of them shot nearly identically to one another. Most of the time, it is a POV shot of a character’s legs in the water, cutting to them getting dragged a few feet, cueing some bad CG sharks, worse CG splashing and a little blood, rinse and repeat. There are even times when major characters die much sooner than I thought they had. It was not out of surprise, but because Harlin’s poor direction made their deaths feel more random than anything else. There is one very improbable shark kill involving a helicopter later on that reaches the joyous stupidity the film should have revelled in, but by the time that happens, it is too little, too late.
Ultimately, Deep Water is a forgettable straight-to-VOD film that somehow escaped containment into movie theatres. The only reason it probably made it there is thanks to the bizarre executive producer credit of one Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. You would be better off doing a double feature of Deep Blue Sea and Gerard Butler’s Plane instead.
