Joel on Film

Deep Water doesn’t offer much that differentiates it from being a pretty typical disaster movie, except maybe that director Renny Harlin spends so long on the concept of a downed-aircraft thriller that the moment it introduces sharks into the equation we’re a bit stymied. Perhaps it’s just that the centerpiece sequence, which is most definitely the plane crash itself, comes on too strong. The scene is horrifyingly realistic and rather unflinching in its violence, and then Harlin follows that up with some pretty cartoonish sharks doing their thing when highly edible humans enter their vicinity.

To damn with faint praise, this is far from the worst disaster movie to involve sharks that has ever been made or even to have been made this year. A few performances here rise above the occasion, to include Ben Kingsley as the briefly disgraced but now ultra-determined airline pilot, Kate Fitzpatrick as the well-past-middle-age passenger who recognizes her own mortality in one crucial moment and Molly Belle Wright as the young daughter of a particularly inappropriate set of parents. The general idea here, which is that an electrical fire sets off the chain of events leading to a forced landing in an ocean before the plane cartwheels upon impact with a coral reef, is a good one.

Unfortunately for Harlin and the team of four screenwriters (Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause and Damien Power), we’ve experienced all this before. We’ve met the eccentric cast of characters whose one or two genuine characteristics will undoubtedly play a role in either living or dying. We’ve seen the plane crashes and the shark attacks, the survival techniques and the methods of bloody carnage, the rousing speeches and the rallying to fight.

The challenge for a specific filmmaking team, in the event that it’s quite difficult to make anything about well-trod territory such as this, is to make it seem at least slightly fresh or exciting enough to distract us from the fact that it isn’t. That’s where Harlin runs into some issues, and it almost seems like it’s no coincidence that this particular director has been tasked with guiding this material. After all, he once made an outstandingly silly shark movie that, through its silliness, became something of a paragon of the form.

He, unfortunately, does not strike twice with this particular effort, which does not suffer in the momentum department, to be sure, but kind of spins its wheels for a while after the plane-crash sequence and keeps reiterating the same idea. The cast also includes Aaron Eckhart as Ben, the flight’s first officer, who is aggrieved by the potential death of his young son very soon, Li Wenhan and Zhao Simei as a pair of esports teammates just barely able to hide their true feelings from each other, and Angus Sampson as Dan, the incorrigible jackass whose faulty lithium battery causes all this damage.

There are a lot more, too, from stepsiblings Cora (Wright) and Finn (Elijah Tamati) who are separated from their parents (played by Kelly Gale and Ryan Bown) and, then, each other, to computer nerd Matt (Richard Crouchley) and the pretty flight attendant (played by Na Shi) who is way out of his league, to another flight attendant named Penny (Lucy Barrett) who’s an expert diver, to many, many more, a lot of them sort of blending in with the background to become shark food. It doesn’t matter too much who is responsible for what role in a narrative like this when most of them share an inevitable fate. As one example, you can be sure kids in a movie like this one are going to be safe by the end of it.

Indeed, after the plane crashes, the sharks arrive and start chomping on the survivors, who have split into three groups already trying to make their way to safety after the disastrous ordeal. It all just seems like salt in the wound, although it would be slightly easier to swallow if the digital effects to bring the sharks to life were more impressive or convincing. They’re serviceable at best, though, and because of that, the movie’s downfall is unfortunately immediate.

There are definitely some cool flourishes and moments here, like when one character awakens to find himself facing a wall of water and Harlin’s camera adjusts his and our perspectives simultaneously, as well as the unexpected and appreciably gory use of a flare gun as a weapon. Deep Water, on the whole, doesn’t offer enough of these moments to distract from how familiar and routine it all is.

Rating: ** (out of ****)