My quick rating – 5.7/10. Sometimes a movie jumps up my watchlist based on nothing more than the name behind the camera. That was absolutely the case with Deep Water. As soon as I saw it was directed by Renny Harlin, the man who brought me a couple of my favorites, Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, this went from a casual “I’ll get around to it eventually” to “alright, let’s see what you’ve got.”
Instead of immediately tossing us into screaming passengers and flying debris, Deep Water takes a surprisingly calm approach. We spend a little time with pilots Ben (Aaron Eckhart) and Rich (Ben Kingsley), getting a glimpse into their everyday lives before disaster strikes. Well, “everyday” might be stretching things when one of those scenes involves karaoke, but close enough. We also meet several passengers, and veteran disaster movie fans will quickly start making predictions about who is going to survive and who is being introduced purely as future shark food. The racist bully, the rude guy shoving through lines, the people who instantly trigger your internal “yeah, that one’s not making it” alarm.
Once the emergency landing begins, Harlin delivers exactly what you hope for. The crash sequence looks great. The tension ramps up nicely. And the aftermath feels quite chaotic. We get a good mix of survivors, injuries, panic, and those souls floating face down. The film does a good job making the situation feel dangerous without turning everything into relentless misery. (If you look at the trailer still image here, I am pretty sure they cut that silly-looking scene.)
The sharks themselves are surprisingly convincing. Yeah, they’re CGI, but they avoid that distracting rubbery look that sinks these kinds of movies. Every dip below the surface kept me glued because you never know if someone is gonna climb back onto the wreckage or become an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. The movie repeatedly gives that false sense of safety before reminding you that hundreds of sharks did not gather here for sightseeing.
One thing I could not stop noticing was the miraculous durability of everyone’s phones. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people carrying expensive devices that can survive repeated underwater adventures and still function perfectly afterward. Forget the sharks, apparently the real science fiction element was the battery life.
Even though Deep Water mostly revolves around the sharks, the movie is actually a survival-action film rather than a horror. The focus is on the cooperation of the passengers, coping with the situation, and staying alive long enough for a rescue. The end does turn out to be rather typical for Hollywood movies, but Harlin embraces that choice with confidence
You’ve seen movies like Deep Water before, no question about it. The idea is far from groundbreaking. What I appreciated is that when the movie decides to be intense, it fully commits to that mission for 106 minutes. No unnecessary detours. No long stretches of boredom. Just a disaster movie that understands exactly what it wants to be and keeps its foot on the gas all the way to the credits.
