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.
Right from the get, Harlin frames his disaster as The Impossible-lite, a deeply, deeply saccharine disaster movie so earnest in its tone that it never quite vibes with all the shark chow-downs. Deep Water, despite its hook, is a tearjerker, or at least it’s trying to be. It even has the aforementioned Fernando Velázquez attached as composer. It’s the greatest knock against the movie. While admirable in its endeavor to imbue its thrills with the kind of heart that punctuated the disaster pictures of yesteryear, it never mixes well with a movie that’s just as keen on playing a greatest hits recap of Deep Blue Sea’s helicopter disaster. Is this Oscar bait or a killer shark flick?
The script, credited to Shayne Armstrong, Pete Bridges, S.P. Krause, and Damien Power, is all over the place, though that’s often part of the charm. The plane crash is realistically staged and remarkably rendered, though it never succumbs to B-movie sensibilities like Sam Raimi’s Send Help earlier this year. Yet, in the same breath, Deep Water is totally keen to chomp would-be survivors to bits, a carryover gag from Harlin’s previous aquatic outing, no doubt, but still much appreciated.
And the sharks themselves, while all digital and incredulously, conveniently-sized for whatever the action demands, earn their credit. Netflix’s Thrash coasted by on its conceit alone, never really bloodying the waters with what a movie called Thrash should have been. Deep Water, on the other hand, lets the sharks loose. They’re always jumping out and chowing down, and the water is always sufficiently red. It’s heaps of fun when Deep Water leans into the kind of elevated, theatrical schlock it knows it is. Nothing will ever top Jaws, but high-angle shots from beneath the surface of still water will never not send me into a panic.
Still, Deep Water is fifteen minutes too long, and its denouement is ridiculous, but not in a The Towering Inferno kind of way. It’s simply absurd, wedged in to give Ben some kind of thematic redemption, building out his tenuous characterization that amounts to “sad, tatted dad.” Eckhart is game to (and good) keep the emotional core buoyed, but it’s a lot of tears in the middle of an already salty… deep blue sea.
A decade ago, I might not have been quite as keen on Deep Water. Yet, in an era of digital sludge and D-tier killer sharks, Renny Harlin’s return to the ocean is fresher than it ought to have been. He still knows his way around an ensemble and a disaster, and in intermittent moments, the Harlin of the 1990s seems to be having the time of his life. If killer sharks are your jam, that fun will be infectious. Usually, it’s best to stay out of the water, but Deep Water is worth treading into this weekend.
Magenta Light Studios will release Deep Water in theaters on Friday, May 1.
-
Deep Water
Summary
Renny Harlin’s Deep Water is an intermittently fun — if oddly sentimental— killer-shark fiasco.
Categorized:Reviews