‘Deep Water’ Movie Review: The Plane-Crash Shark Flick That Pours On The Corn And Corn Syrup
Photo from Magenta Light Studios
From Jeremy Kibler
When you try to see every killer shark movie out there, you can start to tell what separates the good from the bad and the not-so-bad. Renny Harlin’s Deep Water is nowhere near as great as Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea (not many shark movies are), but it’s a decent, capably made programmer if you’ve ever wanted to see The Poseidon Adventure remade alongside Jaws 2. In concept, 2024 indie release No Way Up already beat this one to the punch, but in execution of that “Sharks on a Plane” concept, Deep Water may be the better aquatic watch, even if it’s more sentimental and cornball than it needs to be.
Manned by pilot Rich (Sir Ben Kingsley) and first officer Ben (Aaron Eckhart), a plane is set to take flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. All because of a sparking cell phone in one of the passenger’s checked bags in the cargo bay, the plane crash-lands in the open ocean. Not every soul survives the crash, and the survivors face a different threat in the water. Sharks…why’d it have to be sharks?
A sturdy mid-budget entertainment that combines disaster movie and sharksexploitation, Deep Water takes itself as seriously as it should. This is an ensemble piece with an array of characters to introduce, from flight attendants, to sports teammates and a separated blended family. While characters in a shark movie are usually just paper-thin chum, the script by Pete Bridges and Shayne Armstrong & SP Krause and Damien Power (additional writing by John Kim) does at least try to give some of these souls a few traits and backstories so that we care enough about them when their lives are put into danger. Even sometimes, the ones you think are going to make it are not kept safe.
Aaron Eckhart is a fine-enough hero with a family back home, and Sir Ben Kingsley is wildly overqualified but brings gravitas for the brief time he’s on screen. The character stuff really is bland, but it’s as functional as it needs to be. Most of them are still two-dimensional types, like a hardheaded jock; a precocious little girl named Cora (Molly Belle Wright); a selfish, useless, palpably smelly asshole (Angus Sampson of the Insidious movies) who thinks he can smoke on the plane and is actually the reason the plane goes down; and grandmother Becky (Kate Fitzpatrick), who’s sweet and spry enough to hope the best for her (with a knowing Shelley Winters joke thrown her way).
Think of this way, this is the best generically titled shark movie produced by Kiss member Gene Simmons — and it has no relation to Adrian Lyne’s 2022 erotic thriller starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck as her cuckold husband with a snail collection. At its best, Deep Water delivers a couple of decent jolts (shark blood even splatters on the camera at one point). The plane crash itself is impressively helmed with harrowing intensity, intricately setting up a chain reaction after introducing no less than ten characters. Harlin proves again that he can be a showman (even on a modest budget), and with a late-film helicopter rescue gone wrong, he naturally pays homage to himself. Aerophobics, aquaphobics, and galeophobics should probably steer clear, but this amusing, rudimentary survival thriller-melodrama is kind of a hoot.
Rating: 2.5/5
Deep Water is currently in theaters.
