Deep Water
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Have you ever watched an "Airport" movie and wished the cast would get eaten by sharks? Your dream just came true with DEEP WATER, a disaster movie hybrid with some bloody great action but waterlogged special effects.
The cast of characters is straight out of a 1970's Airport sequel.
Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) is Ben, the committed First Officer trying to get one last round-trip done so he can get home to his wife and ill son.
Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Schindler's List) plays Rich, the fun loving Captain of the flight who's the relaxed commander to Ben's by-the-book co-pilot.
We meet Chinese and American sports teams all boarding the flight from LA to Shanghai, along with an American businessman who is so obnoxious and rude he actually takes the plane down. You'll see how. Angus Sampson (Mad Max:Fury Road) plays Dan, the ugly American with such disgusting vigor that you spend the entire film hoping he gets eaten.
For a film that's half air disaster and half shark movie, the air bound half is far superior. We've seen various plane crashes on film, from the emergency landings in the Airport films to the incredible third-person view in "Knowing", one of Nicholas Cage's best films.
Kudos to Director Renny Harlin being incredibly well positioned to make this movie. "Die Hard 2" showed us he knows his way around an airport and crashing jumbo jets. His "Deep Blue Sea" is a brutally fun Jaws take off with leaping sharks that take down people at any moment.
Harlin and team create a unique air crisis, as a fire starts in the luggage hold and explodes outward, creating so many flying metal projectiles that the inside of the cabin looks like the Normandy beaches. A long sequence from when the fire starts until the aircraft touches the sea is Harlin at his best.
Eckhart and Kingsley are exactly who you want at the helm, a couple enrolling in the Mile High Club have a hell of a journey and explosions reign everywhere you look. The effects budget was wholly spent here because it looks great and keeps you on the edge of your seat.
The plane breaks up, cleverly separating the survivors into different locations across the debris field. It's as if the filmmakers wanted to have one group in an "Airport 77" scenario, with the plane stuck on a coral reef with air at the top of the fuselage, and another group floating in the front section with the cockpit, just so they had to get to each other at some point.
Sharks show up.
And this is where the film really fell off that coral reef for me.
The effects are second rate CGI and don't serve up anything new.
Harlin's last shark flick, way back in 1999, "Deep Blue Sea" was a ground breaker and my favorite shark movie of the era after Jaws 1 and 2. His sharks were lethal, they came out of the water like Shamu and ate any one of the above-the-title stars at any moment. It was funny, fast and furious.
This time out, the sharks are a bit more predictable and have less bite. Lots of limbs get torn off in R rated gore, but predictably so. The biggest surprise in this half was Harlin's ability to get me to invest in young Cora, the daughter of that amorous couple in the lav. Molly Belle Wright is the third best actor in the flick behind Eckhart and Kingsley.
Never boring, the second half just alternates between different groups of survivors and their plight. It gets a bit mired down in shouting matches between passengers that reminded me of Ernest Borgnine's constant shouting in "The Poseidon Adventure".
Harlin also manages to throw in the dumbest helicopter rescue scene since Bruce the Shark took down the helicopter in "Jaws 2".
The final ten minutes also seems to jump forward through a major potential sequence. Budget crunch?
Gene Simmons from Kiss is one of the producers and this isn't the first time he's bankrolled a Harlin movie. Anyone remember Andrew Dice Clay's movie debut in 1990's "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane"? Woof. I have a bad feeling SImmons may go 0 for 2 with this second pairing.
As a airline disaster flick, its pretty good.
As a shark movie, from Harlin, it's disappointing.
In a pitch room, this must have sounded fun.
On the big screen, its bloody meh.
DEEP WATER offers only shallow thrills and only thanks to that plane crash, manages a C-.
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