Oh Renny Harlin, how we’ve missed you. The director who gave us wild genre films like “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and “Deep Blue Sea” went on a long detour for the last few years, spearheading the wretched “The Strangers” reboot trilogy. But he’s back and, as a bonus, he’s doing one of the things he does best: kill people with sharks.
“Deep Water” stars Aaron Eckhart and Sir Ben Kingsley as airline pilots flying a plane full of unusually distinct supporting characters. There’s a newly blended family with parents who apply for the Mile High Club. There’s a pair of esports champions whose love is forbidden by the rules of their game. There are multiple flight attendants with their own personalities, and even the passengers who don’t have anything to contribute have interesting reactions to all the crap they endure.
Yes, look at all those engaging people with relationships that matter and storylines that are going somewhere. They’re going to die very, very badly. “Deep Water” is like an unofficial “Final Destination” movie, where it doesn’t matter what you do or what kind of person you are, because the universe — or at least the director — wants you dead and wants to have sick, twisted fun while killing you.
One of the passengers, played by Angus Sampson, is the worst human being on the planet. He’s so boorish, selfish and lazy that he gets hundreds of people killed without even trying. It’s his suitcase that catches fire in the cargo hold and explodes, starting a domino effect that obliterates the cabin. Harlin adds little bits of mayhem wherever he can. A piece of debris can’t just fly through the air, it must always savagely bludgeon someone in the process. And there’s a lot of debris.
By the time the ship crashes onto a fragile coral reef, separating the passengers across the wreckage, and in air bubbles under the water, you’d think life was bad enough. But oh no, there’s also a feeding frenzy of sharks ripping through the survivors like they’re mini bags of Fritos. Even the nice characters. Especially the nice ones. Don’t get attached to most of these people. Their arms and legs don’t stay attached, that’s for sure.
Sharks kill a lot of people, but Sampson seems determined to stay on top of the murderboard, because everything he touches turns to death. He can’t crawl onto a life raft without feeding another passenger, who was trying to save his life, to the sharks in the process. By the time he screams “I’m an American!” because he wants to be rescued first, it’s abundantly clear that while “Deep Water” isn’t a deep movie, it really hates Americans for how much death and devastation we leave in our wake, all over the world, just by getting up in the morning. And if this guy is our avatar, who can blame them?
“Deep Water” looks, depending on which frame you’re watching, like a modestly-budgeted movie or an incredibly cheap one. No matter what Harlin does, after the plane crashes it always looks like his cast is splashing around in a water tank. There’s charm to that lo-fi quality, as if parts of this movie were made with little more than gumption and a swimming pool, but by the end it really does play like they ran out of time and/or money. Several of the final, emotional scenes barely edit together, or they’re entirely ADR’ed and sandwiched between two other scenes, whether the off-camera dialogue makes sense there or not.
But it’s easy to forgive cheap aesthetics and a rushed finale when the middle of the flick, the sharktastic bloodletting where no character is safe, is such a hoot. Heck, it may even be a hoot-and-a-half. Harlin keeps his action brisk and bracing, and although the characters are spread out across water and sometimes nondescript wreckage, it’s always clear who is who, where they are, and why they’re each uniquely screwed compared to the rest of the cast.
Eckhart is a capable lead, Sampson is a world-class jackass, and Molly Belle Wright — who’s on a roll now, after winning performances in the excellent holiday movie “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” and the emotional indie drama “Omaha” — avoids the clichés that usually come part-and-parcel with young people in disaster movies. Children in genre films are often little more than a hindrance. In the worst examples they get imperiled so often they cease to be characters and devolve into annoying plot points. James Cameron fell into that trap with the last two “Avatar” movies and “Deep Water” doesn’t. Score one for the modest shark flick.
It’s been over 50 years since “Jaws” came out and somehow, despite countless imitators, no shark movie has ever matched it, let alone made a case for being the new greatest of all time. “Deep Water” isn’t in contention, not by a long shot, but it’s such an amusingly mean-spirited, fast-paced aquatic thriller that it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be as good as “Jaws” to be an entertaining shark movie. As good as “Deep Water” is good enough.
