By George & Josh Bate
After misfiring with an ill-conceived trilogy of The Strangers prequel movies, Renny Harlin returns to the genre he’s proven most adept at with Deep Water, in theaters May 1. With the likes of Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, and The Long Kiss Goodnight under his belt, Harlin has demonstrated a decades-long penchant for well-crafted action films and, with Deep Blue Sea, engineered what is arguably the second greatest shark movie of all time. This experience would suggest that Harlin is the perfect choice to helm a film that blends the airplane disaster genre he toyed with in Die Hard 2 with the shark terror he relished in in Deep Blue Sea. Disappointingly, this is not the case as Harlin’s Deep Water fails to sustain the tension of an impressive first act and is bogged down by weak dramatic material and a frustratingly implausible narrative.
Deep Water stars Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley as pilots of a commercial plane en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai. An accidental fire in the cargo hold causes the plane to crash in an ocean, leaving the few survivors stranded in the middle of nowhere. If that wasn’t traumatizing enough, the survivors now need to contend with a frenzy of bloodthirsty sharks drawn to the wreckage.
Harlin’s latest is a film of two halves, the first of which follows a deadly plane crash and the second of which unfolds as a shark horror movie. Deep Water proves most effective in this first half as Harlin leans on his trademark ability to cultivate tension to create a slowly unraveling and harrowing plane crash that will make even the most steadfast of flyers a tad unsettled when embarking on their next flight. Harlin, working from a screenplay that bolsters four writing credits, intelligently takes his time with the build-up to the crash, cluing the audience in on the details of an impending disaster unbeknownst to our characters. When all hell breaks loose aboard the commercial flight, Deep Water doesn’t hold back with its share of brutal deaths, crunching sound design, and palpable anxiety. It’s far from the first nor the best plane crash depicted on-screen, but it achieves an admirable level of nail-biting intensity nonetheless.
Over the course of its first half, Deep Water spends time fleshing out various characters aboard the flight as a means to make the tension of the plane crash and subsequent struggle to avoid becoming shark food all the more dramatic. There’s Aaron Eckhart’s first officer, grizzled by his son’s sickness and coping by throwing himself head-first into his job. We get a blended family and a young daughter who resents her new stepmother and stepbrother. Two E-Sports players share a ‘will they-won’t they’ romance as they lock heads with a group of rowdy American athletes. Angus Sampson plays a comically over-the-top asshole, whose every word uttered beats the audience over the head in conveying that his character is a bad guy. And so on and so on. With stiff acting and generic struggles to grapple, all of this character work on the front-end would not feel out of place in a shoddily written soap opera characterized by thin characters and even thinner arcs. In turn, no one truly feels like an actual person and, instead, are more akin to a caricature with the most mundane and cookie-cutter of personality traits and emotional struggles.
The poor character work on the front end means that, as Deep Water evolves into a high body count shark movie in its second half, care for the soon-to-be shark food remains low. As a result, all the time spent on individual character arcs, whether that be a redemption arc for one or romance for another, proves more exasperating than moving – to such an extent that one can’t help but side with the sharks at times.
Challenges fostering investment in the collection of characters would be easier to overlook if Deep Water’s second half bolstered the same kind of pulse-pounding tension that characterized its first half, but this is sadly not the case. A contrast to some of Harlin’s previous efforts in the action genre, his latest film lacks the visual precision that previously allowed audiences to be intimately familiar with the geography in which action set-pieces take place. Following the crash, the plane divides into three pieces, after which the film oscillates between focusing on a group of survivors contained to each of the three pieces. Harlin never quite acclimates his viewers to these spaces, however, leaving one to get lost in tangential thoughts about the film’s setting, rather than the life-or-death stakes our characters are grappling with.
It wouldn’t be a B-horror movie without a fair share of illogical character decisions and narrative implausibilities, but Deep Water features an overabundance of these distractions. The former just furthers the aforementioned issue of characters who feel neither real nor fleshed-out, while the latter repeatedly removes one from the tension on-screen and elicits chuckles rather than gasps. From characters not appropriately responding to the temperature of ocean water to sharks behaving like homing missiles one second and clueless, meandering creatures the next, Harlin’s film struggles to remain grounded in reality and, as such, quickly loses the level of suspense that made its first half so effective.
VERDICT: 4.5/10
Deep Water sees director Renny Harlin return to the genre he’s proven most adept in with a thriller that blends airplane disaster and shark survival film. But despite being helmed by the filmmaker behind Deep Blue Sea, arguably the second best ever shark movie, the new film underwhelms. After a well-crafted first half that slowly and effectively escalates tension, Deep Water sinks with a second half marred by illogical character decisions, narrative implausibilities, and thin character work that would not be out of place in a subpar soap opera. The latter issue proves most damning for Harlin’s film as extensive time spent giving an ensemble of characters the most routine of arcs and struggles to grapple with goes entirely unrewarded, thus eliminating the audience’s investment in the fates of our characters. Harlin may be responsible for iconic films like Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Deep Blue Sea, but it’s been quite some time since the filmmaker masterminded a real gem. While promising in bringing the filmmaker behind the best shark movie not made by Steven Spielberg back to the shark thriller movie, Deep Water sinks to the bottom of our expectations.