Tweet
Review by James Lindorf
As someone who grew up watching films like “Jaws,” “Cujo,” and “Arachnophobia,” animal attack films have held a special place in my heart. I continue to seek them out to this day, most recently loving 2023’s “Cocaine Bear.” As a species, we have a love, need, and fear relationship with animals. We love cuddling and playing with them; we depend on them for companionship, work, and food. We may be at the top of the food chain, but it isn’t because we win a lot of one-on-one fights, and as Chris Rock once said, we are always worried about tigers going, tiger. This complexity is what makes them a great cinematic villain, and no animal plays that role better than a shark. It is prehistoric and can strike unseen from the depths when we are at our most vulnerable. The latest shark attack thriller, “Deep Water,” opens in theaters everywhere on May 1st.
When a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai goes down in the middle of the Pacific, the survivors quickly discover that drowning is the least of their problems. First Officer Ben (Aaron Eckhart) is friendly with his passengers and capable in a crisis, though he has spent years emotionally distancing himself from the people in his life. Taking job after job while his son battles a serious illness back home. A chance to protect Cora (Molly Wright), a young girl traveling with her family, gives Ben something he can actually fight and may be just what he needs to escape this cycle. Also on the flight team is Rich (Ben Kingsley), the charismatic Captain who is hopefully a better pilot than singer. Then there is Dan (Angus Sampson), a passenger who functions as the film’s human villain. Dan is selfish and offensive in every scene, and Sampson plays him so perfectly that you find yourself hoping everyone else gets a swing at him before the sharks do. The survivors will have to work together to survive the sharks and harsh environment of the ocean while waiting for help.
Director Renny Harlin will always get a nostalgia pass from me thanks to “Die Hard 2” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.” You may not remember, but this isn’t even his first trip to shark-infested waters, with 1999’s “Deep Blue Sea” already on his resume. One thing “Deep Blue Sea” had that “Deep Water” does not is deep pockets, at least in practical terms. On paper, the $80 million budget for “Deep Water” looks competitive with the $60- $82 million spent on its predecessor. However, adjusted for inflation, that earlier film had at least $120 million in today’s purchasing power, and it shows. After 27 years of technical advances, there isn’t a single moment, let alone a full scene, where the sharks look as convincing as they did then. The film does have strong sets, particularly the underwater plane sequences, but no amount of production design can compensate when the central threat fails to convince.
Wright, who impressed me in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” is a genuinely talented young actress, and she does her best with Cora. The problem is that the character is inconsistently written. The film is building toward something specific with her, and then, the writers seemingly ran out of ideas for her. This bold girl, set to be a hero in her own right, is gone as she retreats into a kind of trauma-induced blankness. It is not without psychological logic, but it arrives so abruptly that it reads more like an abandoned arc than an intentional choice.
Harlin keeps things moving at high speed, and there is real craft in how he handles the survival mechanics and the set pieces around the wreckage. Eckhart’s emotional detachment is a character choice that mostly works, even if it limits how much you root for Ben in the early going. The film is at its best when the human dysfunction and the shark threat are working in tandem, and at its weakest when one has to carry the other alone. “Deep Water” is not a bad animal-attack film; more of a middle-of-the-pack one. It doesn’t have the fun of “Deep Blue Sea” or the tension of “Jaws,” but it is still entertaining. Fans of the genre will find enough to enjoy, and Harlin clearly knows how to stage this kind of chaos. But with CGI that falls short of a film made before the turn of the century and a third act that loses its nerve with one of its most interesting characters, “Deep Water” sinks just below the surface of what it could have been. It comes in at a 3 out of 5.
Rating: R (Some Language|Violent Content/Bloody Images)
Genre: Horror, Mystery & Thriller
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): May 1st, 2026
Runtime: 1h 46m
Director: Renny Harlin
Producer: Dale G. Bradley, Grant Bradley, Adrián Guerra, Neal Kingston, Robert Van Norden
Screenwriter: Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, Damien Power
Distributor: Magenta Light Studios
Production Co: Arclight Films, Nostromo Pictures
