Deep Water

Last year, I reviewed Bait, which was a surprisingly solid shark movie that took place in a grocery store. In my Random Thoughts, I noted that there was apparently a sequel that looked completely unrelated to it.

Guess what finally got released in theaters earlier this month.

Welcome to the 3rd Annual An Honest Fangirl’s Summer Shark Fest Extravaganza (I guess the name isn’t really pending at this point).

Logistics out of the way first: Bait had a planned sequel about a flight that crashed enroute from China to Australia, only for it to get shelved in 2014 due to what Wikipedia calls “uncomfortable similarities” to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The sequel was revived in 2023 with Renny Harlin as the director.

Harlin is a very encouraging name because he was also the director for Deep Blue Sea. The man knows how to make a good shark movie. He even got Aaron Eckhart as a lead, which is basically as close as you can get to Thomas Jane without actually getting Thomas Jane. (Seriously, how are they not related? They look identical.) Alas, there is no wet suit, but at least there’s a pilot uniform?

The plot is the same as that planned sequel, although the plane leaves from LA en route to Shanghai instead. And there are absolutely zero connections or references to Bait. Deep Water is very much its own thing.

It’s actually arguably more of an airplane movie than it is a shark one. No Way Up, which I also reviewed last year, got the plane in the water very quickly. The entire story was focused more on surviving after impact than anything else.

Deep Water takes its time. The plane doesn’t actually hit the water until about halfway through, and the sharks wait a bit before showing up too. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I usually like it when a movie makes sure that I know and grow attached to its characters before they’re killed off.

Unfortunately, there are far too many characters and literally none of them are ever elevated beyond a generic stereotype. Some of them don’t even get names. These aren’t canon fodder either! I mean characters that we’re meant to know and recognize and who theoretically have some small character arc that they go through.

The movie would have been a lot tighter if it had cut the size of the cast. Not only would it have given them room to actually grow, but it also would have reduced the number of disappointing deaths. There were three characters, all of which were relatively important and a big part of the story, that got very quick, kind of random deaths that happened almost entirely offscreen. That’s a little lame.

I don’t just want to see a dead body drift by. I want to see how he dies! Especially since the last time we saw him, he was relatively fine and he was a large part of the movie up until that point.

It honestly makes me wonder just how much of the movie was left on the cutting room floor. It’s not necessarily a short movie, clocking in at 107 minutes, but it feels like it’s missing some connective tissue.

It also feels like the four writers involved worked on four different parts of the script and never read anyone else’s. At least not when it comes to characterization and actually following through on the myriad of plot hooks that are set up in the first act.

For example, there’s Lilly. She’s introduced as someone who is very brash and direct, the kind of woman who regrets not punching the jerk who aggressively flirted with her. She’s described as reckless in two different scenes, one of which involved a very detailed example of how she just goes off on her own without stopping to consider the fact that she has a team that she is supposed to work with.

It’s a pretty standard character trait that clearly has been brought up because it foreshadows how she will act moving forward. Maybe she does something incredibly risky that technically works but results in someone else getting killed because she didn’t communicate well and they had to cover for her. Then she grows and learns to work with people, or maybe the friend who insisted that she was reckless learns to trust her and lets her carry out her plan. You could go either way.

Only none of that happens because she has a complete personality transfer the moment the plane hits the water. She immediately becomes a damsel that really isn’t a part of the plot at all moving forward, and the idea of her being reckless is never brought up again. Instead, she becomes nothing more than a romantic object for her friend (the same one who scolded her for being reckless!) to earn by being brave and assertive.

She’s not the only character to have something like this happen either. Ben, our first officer and closest thing we have to a protagonist, has a collection of trauma and vaguely mentioned issues that are kind of resolved but also not at all. Most of the time, characters are just randomly killed off instead of having any resolution.

If nothing else, the movie has one of the very best plane crash scenes that I’ve ever seen. It’s long and violent and checks in with multiple characters while staying coherent and looks like the vast majority of it was done as practically as possible. I always love a practical set, but especially when you’re also throwing water at people.

It was absolutely amazing. If I ever rewatch this movie, it would be solely for that scene. It’s not just the crash either. It’s watching Rich, the captain, and Ben struggling to get the plane under control and working through the process of managing the disaster. It was technical, and seemed pretty realistic according to the many, many episodes of Air Disasters that I’ve watched.

The tension builds and releases and then explodes. There were several seconds of black silence after it ended, and I needed those moments to actually catch my breath.

Did I also think that maybe something in my theatre broke and it was a mistake? Yes. The pause went on for just a little bit too long. But I still appreciated the breathing room!

It also set up the rest of the movie really well. When a plane hits the water at high speed, it’s going to leave a sizable debris field. It’s the perfect excuse to split up our cast into smaller groups and vary the threats that they face. And if they want to reunite, they have to enter the water, which is obviously shark infested and basically certain death.

Characters got into the water too. I don’t know if it was in a tank or if they really were off shore somewhere, but it looked like they were in the ocean, which is always appreciated.

The sharks themselves were clearly CGI of semi-variable quality. There really wasn’t anything exciting or fun in how they attacked people, so that did admittedly get a little boring towards the end. At least they left realistic looking bite wounds on the survivors. Some of them looked gnarly, too. It was great.

There were a few weird quirks on the post-production side of things. There are subtitles for anything that is sung, even if the lyrics are English, but not for spoken English dialogue. Written non-English words, like a coloring book with the Chinese words for ‘Coloring Book’ on the cover, were translated via subtitle. The translations were never for anything critical. There wasn’t any plot relevance to them. They were just there. It was weird! Especially since the subtitles for singing, translations, and non-English dialogue were all in different fonts, colors, and sizes.

Since the first dialogue that we hear is Ben Kingsley singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” I thought that I had bought a ticket to an open-captioned showing. It wouldn’t have been an issue – I watch everything with subtitles when I’m home – but it was unexpected.

Overall, Deep Water is a very serviceable shark movie with moments of brilliance. It’s nowhere near Deep Blue Sea, but there are also far worse ones to watch. The plane crash is definitely worth finding if nothing else.

Random Thoughts

Ben Kingsley is far too old to be a professional pilot. They have a mandatory retirement age of 65. Kingsley is 82.

Aaron Eckhart makes the cut, though. He’s only 58.

Renny Harlin has directed some of my favorite comfort movies, including the incredibly homoerotic The Covenant and the actually decent Devil’s Pass.

While it’s not stated, the sharks look like (very, very large) makos. I’m assuming that they’re a reference to Deep Blue Sea.

I did appreciate that Lilly is a high level esports player.

There really needs to be a limit on how many shark movies can name a character Finn.

As always, if you have any shark movie requests, please let me know! It doesn’t have to be a specific movie, either. You can also request general categories like “Ridiculous 2010s Syfy Original Movies.”

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.

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