Director Renny Harlin makes a return to the world of sharks in Deep Water from Magenta Light Studios. Pete Bridges and John Kim pen the film’s screenplay, blending two of the most well-known genres: disaster flicks and animal attacks.
The film opens with the flight crew of Northeastern Airlines enjoying a night off before their flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, China. The crew includes Captain Richard (Ben Kingsley) and First Officer Ben (Aaron Eckhart). Richard is clearly the life of the party, grabbing the mic for karaoke and owning the room. At the same time, Ben carries a quieter energy, hinting at personal issues simmering beneath the surface.
That momentum carries over as we’re introduced to the passengers, including fake alpha male Dan (Angus Sampson), the kind of traveler who treats every shared space like it’s his living room, and Cora (Molly Wright), a teenager saddled with more responsibility than she signed up for, keeping a watchful eye on her younger stepbrother Finn (Elijah Tamati).
Once in the air, a seemingly harmless detail—a worn, frayed charging cord tucked away in a passenger’s luggage—sets off a domino effect. What starts as a small spark in the cargo hold quickly spirals out of control, pushing the flight into chaos. The tension ramps up as the cockpit scrambles, and before long, Ben and Richard are forced into an impossible decision: put the plane down in open Water and hope for the best. Some survive the crash… but the real danger is already circling beneath them, as the plan is in shark-infested waters.
“Deep Water” has all the right ingredients to work as pure, mindless popcorn entertainment. You’ve got an Oscar winner in Ben Kingsley, a committed, intensity-driven performance from Aaron Eckhart, and a director in Renny Harlin who’s delivered some of the most memorable action films of the ’90s. Add in a simple, high-concept premise, and on paper, this thing should soar. But somehow… it doesn’t quite come together the way you expect.
I’ll start with the positive: the plane crash sequence has more tension than anything Harlin attempted in his recent “Strangers” trilogy. I watched the film in the comfort of my own home and was generally on the edge of my seat. While some of the effects are CGI, the influence of old-school filmmaking is evident as well. bodies drop, passengers vanish midair, and the death toll climbs fast. The cockpit panic between Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart feels urgent, while the midair breakup scatters survivors, giving the film multiple survival threads to juggle.
Unfortunately, once the plane goes down, the film bleeds off the tension it worked so hard to build. When the sharks finally enter the picture, the threat feels more like an obligation than an escalation. Renny Harlin stages a few sharp attack beats. Still, his focus drifts toward logistics—Ben trying to organize survivors into rafts—and a series of shallow side characters who exist solely to be picked off. It’s telling that the movie feels tighter, even more focused, in the moments before the sharks show up.
“Deep Water” wants to be taken seriously, but it never quite clicks. Renny Harlin builds some tension early, then lets it slip, getting bogged down in slow, sometimes awkward moments. What should hit hard ends up just floating there.
Final Grade: C-
“Deep Water” opens in theaters Thursday, April 30th.
