Renny Harlin’s ‘Deep Water’ Is No ‘Deep Blue Sea,’ but It’s Closer Than We’ve Ever Gotten [Review]

Renny Harlin needs a win. Horror fans no doubt hold the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Deep Blue Sea (and maybe Cliffhanger, if you’re me) in high regard. Harlin is, by dint of the sheer diversity of his filmography, an everyman, capable of helming high-octane action, misguided horror prequels, and one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. But he’s active, churning out more work than you could imagine, including the widely maligned three-part The Strangers reboot. There’s almost no coming back from that, though luckily, his latest, Deep Water, is a step in the right direction. It’s 1999 again, with the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The origins are more preposterous than the conceit (killer sharks pick off plane crash survivors). Once envisioned as a sequel to Bait (killer sharks in a grocery store, if you remember), it was Kiss bassist Gene Simmons and a shift in ownership of the production company that revived Deep Water more than a decade after conception. But really, like The Last Voyage of the Demeter several years ago, it reeks of something first envisioned in the last century, and I mean that in largely complimentary terms.

Pilot Ben (Aaron Eckhart) has a sick son he’s avoiding, so he takes a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai to spend more time away from home. Men really would rather combat ferocious sharks than be with their wives, huh? In typical Snakes on a Plane (or, really, any plane disaster) fashion, D.J. Stipsen’s camera fluidly rolls through the least busy airport ever to brand the passengers as survivors or chum. There’s Cora (Molly Belle Wright), a deeply anxious flyer with the world’s horniest parents, and Dan (Angus Sampson), a chain-smoking cad you can’t wait to see eaten. Sam (Li Wenhan) and Lilly (Zhao Simei) are burgeoning lovebirds returning home. And Sir Ben Kinglsey is technically co-pilot, Rich, but he’s really just Sir Ben Kinglsey.