By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Aaron Eckhart, Sir Ben Kingsley and Angus Sampson
Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause and Damien Power
Magenta Light Studios
DEEP WATER may be Renny Harlin’s second big-scale shark thriller after DEEP BLUE SEA, but his most pertinent credit here is actually DIE HARD 2. Here as there, and likely on a much smaller budget, he seriously gets his plane-crash mojo on with the disaster that befalls a Northeast Airlines flight to Shanghai. It’s a longer-than-usual, scarily sustained and very physically convincing sequence as things go from bad to worse and pilot Rich (Sir Ben Kingsley) and his first officer Ben (Aaron Eckhart) wrestle with their disintegrating craft. They wind up ditching way out in the open ocean, albeit in an area where a coral reef just beneath the surface can do the plane even more damage.
Thus does DEEP WATER peak early and excitingly, before it gets to the real meat of the story, which is how the survivors, stranded on large and small pieces of debris, deal with the hungry sharks circling around them. There’s occasional tension and thrills to be had here too, but it also feels like just what you’d expect from a movie with over 30 producers and executive producers—including Gene Simmons (yes, that one) and the guys behind WITCHBOARD and NIGHT OF THE DEMONS—and four scripters, plus one credited for “additional writing.” (Among the latter are two of the writers of BAIT, the 2012 shark thriller to which DEEP WATER began life as a loose sequel.)
As a result, a lot of the stuff before the crash consists of on-the-nose setup and dramatic underlining to make sure absolutely everyone in the audience is clear about everything. Once the airliner achieves cruising speed, it’s a nice idea to show the hang time among the cockpit crew when the hard part is over, but this portion consists largely of Ben’s co-workers explaining his backstory to him. After it’s established that a faulty cell phone battery in the luggage of the movie’s Designated Asshole, an ugly American played by Angus Sampson of the INSIDIOUS movies, is going to be trouble, there are endless, ominous shots of his suitcase. And of the bin in the cargo hold containing his suitcase. It gets to the point where you’re surprised we don’t get lots of establishing shots of sharks in the sea before the plane goes down.
Once the killer fish do make the scene, Harlin has the same right idea as the makers of this month’s THRASH, presenting them as natural predators instead of supercharged monsters. The combination of physical mockups and CG sharks (two of the VFX houses are the appropriately named Orca Studios and Fin) works pretty well for the most part, and there are a couple of startling moments when someone gets unexpectedly munched, or drowned.
For the most part, the characters themselves are the usual disaster-movie types, their assorted plights played for straightforward melodrama and sentimentality, with performances that are no better, but certainly no worse, than they have to be. A little more wit and variation would have helped; there are some lighter moments between a young man named Matt (Richard Crouchley) and acerbic older woman Becky (Kate Fitzpatrick), and Sampson has fun making his selfish role as despicable as possible. There are also two members of a Chinese youth e-sports team, Sam (Li Wenhan) and a girl addressed as Lisa on screen and listed as Lilly in the credits (Zhao Simei), who recall similar characters in TRAIN TO BUSAN—an ensemble genre film that made its people and their situations a lot more distinctive.
DEEP WATER has so many folks floating around the crash site that it eventually loses track of a few of them, and it will likely make you feel more nervous about flying than about taking a dip in the ocean. Still, it delivers the goods in an elemental sort of way, and there’s something endearing about being able to catch a movie like this on the big screen—with a scale to match the showcase—when so many like it are relegated to home viewing. Trivia note: This is the second shark film in a row after THRASH in which someone notes the dangerous qualities of hippopotami, as if to prime audiences for the upcoming killer-hippo flick HUNGRY.
