Deep Water doesn’t jump the shark so much as it gleefully somersaults over it

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Deep Water

Directed by Renny Harlin

Written by Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause and Damien Power

Starring Aaron Eckhart, Molly Belle Wright and Ben Kingsley

Classification 14A; 107 minutes

Opens in theatres May 1

If you should somehow wander into a showing of the new killer-shark movie Deep Water at your local multiplex this weekend, don’t panic.

No, you did not slip into a space-time wormhole and end up in the year 2008, when it would be more reasonable to see a wide-release film headlined by Aaron Eckhart. No, you didn’t travel even further back in time to 1999, which is when director Renny Harlin previously delivered a movie in which a bunch of one-dimensional characters get munched on by giant sharks. And no, you did not somehow teleport to contemporary Beijing, where it wouldn’t be all that strange to see a movie whose plot hinges on a heroic act by selfless Chinese authorities, the type of ultra-patriotic ending regularly favoured by that state’s propagandistic censors.

So check your calendar and update your Find My iPhone app, because Deep Water is somehow, against all the laws of logic and reality, a genuine 2026, made-in-Hollywood-or-thereabouts movie starring Eckhart, Sir Ben Kingsley, and too many poorly rendered CGI sharks to count. What’s more: it’s not arriving on a third-tier streaming service, but is being released on hundreds of real-deal big screens across North America.

The most surprising thing about Deep Water, though? It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

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The good, such as it is, stems from the practical application of old-school thrills by director Harlin, a filmmaker whose career is so marked by peaks and valleys that his C.V. resembles a Richter scale. He is the action maestro who’s made such all-timers as Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. But he’s also the guy who hacked and slashed his way across Cutthroat Island, Driven, Mindhunters, and a handful of other early aughts misfires and bombs. No matter the tongue-in-cheek goodwill that Harlin earned in between for 1999’s Deep Blue Sea, the Finnish filmmaker was eventually sent packing to China, where he spent years making forgettable Mandarin-language action flicks. (Which might explain his latest film’s affinity for that country’s self-sacrificing citizenry.)

For whatever reason, Harlin has resurfaced from his China adventures – with a brief-but-not-brief-enough detour into remaking The Strangers into a deathly dull trilogy of slasher flicks – by diving into the shark-infested waves of Deep Water. A cheapo thriller whose many, many, many producer credits (from prolific genre peddler Bob Yari to Gene Simmons of KISS fame) hint at how crassly the film was engineered, the new movie plays like a seven-year-old child’s fever dream. What if there was a movie about a plane crash? And what if that plane crashed into the middle of the Pacific Ocean? And what if that ocean was filled with very hungry sharks?

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That’s all you need to know, even though Harlin and his four screenwriters try to needlessly broaden the picture by giving paper-thin character traits to the crash survivors. There is the stoic first officer who just wants his kids back (Eckhart, in role that could’ve and maybe should’ve gone to Tom Jane), the chain-smoking jerk who doesn’t handle disaster well (Angus Sampson), the resourceful flight attendant (Kate Fitzpatrick), the lost little girl looking for her family (Molly Belle Wright), and the plane’s veteran pilot (Kingsley), who is cast with such a prominent, surely-better-than-this-material actor that you can surmise he’s not sticking around on-screen all that long.

While the film’s first 10 minutes underline just how chintzy a production this is – the airport, meant to be LAX, looks like an empty warehouse, and even the faux plane’s interior looks second-rate – once Harlin gets to the crash itself, the film briefly transforms itself in a A-tier B-movie.

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There is something beautifully chaotic in how Harlin tears his plane, and its 200-plus passengers, apart. Here is a director who knows what audiences want and need when it comes to mid-air carnage. Sure, the sound mix is so wonky that you’re deafened by the twisting metal but barely able to hear what Eckhart and Kingsley are saying to each other as they try to avoid disaster. And yes, we mostly know which characters are going to survive the crash given how much time the film devoted to them beforehand. But for about 12 glorious mayday-thick minutes, Harlin’s film is all killer, no filler.

It is only when the plane hits the ocean and the sharks finally show up that the film ironically loses any bite. This is especially disappointing given Harlin’s previous experience with ripping off Jaws. But when you give your leading man nothing much to do other than look sadly into the distance – and when you seemingly exhausted your budget on the crash and have nothing leftover to digitally render the sharks – what should you expect? This blue sea, it ain’t all that deep.