There are disaster movies, and then there are what I call “bowling pin movies”—the kind that require no further brainpower than watching people set up just to get immediately knocked down. And if they’re not knocked down in the first go, rest assured, something’s gonna get those that remain. You know the type of flick you’re in for when you get barely-established personalities, a larger focus on the action than the act of making sense, and arch characters whose actions define their fates (which you’ll work out the second they arrive on screen). Renny Harlin’s Deep Water is one such movie, featuring single-note characters whose job is to get you to the end credits—no more, no less.
To the credit of both Harlin and the cast, they perform their duties accurately and with dramatic vigor. However, with the script denying them any sense of actual shades of humanity, they’re extremely limited in depth. If you’re looking for the depth reserved for bigger budgets and higher-profile actors, go for something like The Poseidon Adventure (which Deep Water actually references!) or The Towering Inferno, where personal involvement was a little higher. Here, each character is written for a specific purpose—the muted leader with a chip on his shoulder, the kid who doesn’t listen (especially when told not to move in a very precarious situation), the old woman who connects with a young child, the past-his-prime captain who knows when it’s time to give up, the two men who start out as enemies but wind up being friends, the fated lovebirds, and the self-serving asshole whose fault it never is—and that’s exactly what we get.
All of these archetypes and more are loaded on a plane heading from Los Angeles to Shanghai, but an electronics fire forces them to make an emergency water landing over the open sea with no land in sight. (I can only hear George Carlin saying, “What exactly is… a ‘water landing’? Am I mistaken, or does this sound somewhat similar to ‘crashing into the ocean‘?!”) Not only do the survivors have to deal with a plane that’s been cut into three sections and spread over a coral reef in the crash, but they also don’t notice bodies start disappearing, yanked under by mako sharks. The last two-thirds of Deep Water try to regroup the remaining passengers in the safety of airplane rafts, and that’s largely where this movie spends its time, pitting a few volatile personalities against the more cool-headed, not to mention all of the humans against the rising waters and the sharks.
For the first fifteen minutes, we get a lot of the nice-to-meet-yous and minuscule backstories to help seat us comfortably. We see that the plane’s First Officer Ben (Aaron Eckhart) is running away from personal trauma, but he’s couching it as “I’ve gotta keep working to help the family stay afloat, and I’ll see the kids when I get home.” On the way to the plane, he runs into the young Cora (Molly Belle Wright), a seven-year-old afraid to fly who, of course, winds up with her brother Finn (Elijah Tamati), and their parents sitting in the rows behind Ben’s cockpit. Screenwriters Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, and Damien Power really want us to attach ourselves to these three and get behind them; admirably, everyone works together to make sure that we do.
The only other person to get so strong a foundation is the entitled mass of prickery called Dan (Angus Sampson), whose blatant disregard for anyone that’s not him delivers him right into the “I hope a shark makes him suffer to his last breath” category. He honestly embodies everything wrong with humanity, stepping on everyone’s toes to gain the smallest, pettiest advantage over the next person. Seriously, when the movie’s not making you root for Ben and the others, it’s actively making you hate Dan, and you wind up spending the movie wondering when he’s going to get his. Angus Sampson sinks his teeth into this role, pushing for maximum reprehensibility and achieving at least ten times his desired effect.
Aside from these four characters, no one else really cuts a huge path, other than being a meek bystander who just wants to help or someone eager to look like a hero. These are essentially the counselors in Friday the 13th Part 2 who go unnamed and survive because they stay out of the way. Sure, someone like the woman Madeleine West plays might get a few jabs in here or there, and the will-they-or-won’t they eSports teammates might keep us on the hook in hopes that they’ll get together. But mostly, Deep Water is a no-nonsense, drily realistic look at disparate folks in a desperate situation, and everyone and everything has been streamlined to the point where we realize that yeah, there aren’t any big dramatics, but there isn’t much oomph, either.
Maybe that’s a good thing. We don’t need a ton of screaming and shouting in an incident that requires cool heads. It’s a very matter-of-fact manner that Deep Water operates under, but it comes with the price of veering into corny territory. Because of its straightforward ethos, it is sculpted and channeled by the narrow definitions the script lays out for our survivors. It’s not a matter of not being jokey or terrifying enough—although the CGI sharks and surroundings kinda push it toward the former—it’s just a matter of not being enough. The film makes us feel like we’ve been dropped into this situation to take cold, impersonal bets on who’s going to make it to the end, even when it looks like someone’s been grievously injured and has lost a lot of blood. We know who we don’t like, but the other characters don’t pull us in any sort of emotional direction other than the ones whose journeys have been predestined for us to care about.
To be sure, there are wince-inducing and frantic moments that Renny Harlin guides with practiced ease (y’all remember his other shark film, Deep Blue Sea, right?). There’s genuine terror generated by the sharks and the perils of the remaining plane sections sinking, thereby exposing survivors to the sharks or threatening to run out of air, but there are also some eye-rolling moments that cement the rote plot and character beats. It’s at least balanced between the action and the cheese, and Aaron Eckhart essays his role with solid feeling, grounding the film with a realistic portrayal of someone who grows to accept his sudden role as group leader. Deep Water isn’t a bad watch, as it’s competently made and casts a decent level of ominous dread, but it’s matched with a whole lot of been-there-done-that in its writing. There’s a better movie in here somewhere; for now, the best Deep Water can do is rise to the ceiling that’s trapping it from becoming one.
