Deep Water: Downed Plane Meets Uppity Sharks in Old-School Disaster Movie

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

How did Deep Water not get made 40-odd years ago?

Consider this. 1972 brought us The Poseidon Adventure. Jaws came out in 1975. And I forget what year delivered Airport ’77. Deep Water exists at their point of concurrency. It should have been dreamed up and produced in 1979 or ’80.

Instead, it (ahem) got off the ground back in 2012, envisaged as a loose sequel to Bait, in which a tsunami dumps a bunch of Great White Sharks in a flooded supermarket. (That’s Australia for you!)

Unfortunately, similarities to the disappearance at sea of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 scuppered it for a while.

Now it’s back, and what a fun ride. Early trailers didn’t make it clear whether the prevailing mood was going to be satiric or dramatic, and the one-two punch of Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley as airline pilots didn’t settle things — both can swing between gravitas and goofball if required.

The title provides a clue, however. The movie is called Deep Water, not Fins Under a Plane. And early scenes, backed by Fernando Velázquez’s dark, theatrical score, focus on mostly serious characters, including a precocious little girl and her derpy stepbrother, a team of Chinese professional video gamers, a bunch of American fratboys and Angus Sampson as Dan, the designated asshole. He’s also a chain smoker.

Things get off to a straightforward start — a little ribbing between the pilots, two horny parents slipping off to join the mile-high club, and some mild flirtation between Chinese teammates, and between a geeky programmer and a flight attendant. Oh, and a straight talking grandmother whom even the film knows would have been played circa 1979 by Shelley Winters.

Alas, Dan’s luggage (which has been getting more screen time than Eckhart) proves as big a jerk as its owner, and starts an improbable series of events that brings the plane down in the ocean. The crash is so intense that, at an advance screening, one traumatized viewer could be heard whispering in its wake: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

All this brings us about a half hour into the one-hour-and-50-minute runtime of Deep Water. Next up: Sharks! They are ludicrously numerous, impossibly hungry and weirdly tenacious, but that’s exactly what you want in an ocean-based disaster thriller.

Director Renny Harlin provides oodles of underwater POVs of tasty-looking legs as people struggle to stay above water amid burning debris, dead bodies and a very small number of leaky rafts.

Harlin has had a long and uneven career leading up to this. Though he isn’t quite old enough to have tackled Deep Water back in 1979, he did make Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 in the 1990s, and this feels like a kind of spiritual successor to those star-driven action movies.

Eckhart grimly grits his teeth and quietly pines for his family amid a vague backstory of aeronautical disgrace. The cast, 90 per cent Australian (kudos to their dialect coach), switch between being terrified, angry, exhausted or resigned as required.

And those sharks keep on partying like it’s 1979. Pity the popcorn prices are firmly set in the 21st century.

Deep Water. Directed by Renny Harlin. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, and Angus Sampson. Opens May 1 in cinemas.