DEEP WATER Review: Aaron Eckhart And Ben Kingsley Keep Afloat Renny Harlin’s Workaday Shark Thriller
Deep Water released theatrically on May 1. The film will arrive on VoD and Digital on June 16 from Magenta Light Studios.
I don’t typically do shark movies, but as far as survival thrillers go, I’m always down to see how well a director measures up. Thus, we get Renny Harlin whose latest, Deep Water, sets the stage for a harrowing tale of a stoic pilot and a mishmash of clashing personalities all forced to wait out the terror surrounding them in terrorizing waters amid the Pacific.
The cast is led prominently by Aaron Eckhart from a script by John Kim and Pete Bridges, with ancillary performances by Ben Kingsley who shares the cockpit with Eckhart. Things don’t pick up until about twenty minutes into the movie after which we’ve met and gotten well acquainted with our protagonists Ben (Eckhart) and Rich (Kingsley), leading up to the peril as their flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai befalls a freak accident that causes the plane to crash.
An explosion suddenly rocks the cargo area of the plan and causes complete and total catastrophe, with severe injury and death to most of the passengers on board, leaving roughly fifty people scant and stranded in the Pacific, including the family of young brother and sister Finn (Elijah Tamati) and Cora (Molly Belle Wright), flight attendants Penny (Lucy Barrett) and Zoe (Nashi), e-sporters Sam (Li Wenhan) and Lily (Zhao Simei), and irritable blowhard Dan (Angus Sampson). Making matters worse is the family of sharks circling the floating wreckage with nearly no help in sight, while it’s up to Ben and as many crew and willing hands as there are left to work together if they have any chance of making it home alive.
Eckhart is feasible as the complicated protagonist with a troubling past and beleaguring problems of his own, trudging an effort to lead with compassion more than anything. Kingsley’s role guarantees sympathy as the easy-going, karaoke-singing Ben. The rest of the cast turn in some amiable performances with Sampson laying the groundwork for the one character in the film you’ll be glad to see to the end.
Deep Water turns in modestly entertaining genre spectacle, ultimately conceding to the kinds of inevitable tropes you would gather from a film of its kind. The good news is that between the characters you’re rooting for and those you’re absent from, you’re still left compelled to wonder at the risk of getting attached to some characters along the way, even if some aspects of Deep Water still bode predictable in the long haul.
Even better on the plus side of things is that Deep Water checks all the necessary boxes on matters of gore and violence with some shots slightly more gruesome than others. If you don’t mind the red stuff and know what you’re in for, you can expect to see a shark movie do what a shark movie does, with plenty to take away in the aftermath.
Native New Yorker. Been writing for a long time now, and I enjoy what I do. Be nice to me!
