Shark frenzy (yawn) and an eerie inn
“Deep Water”
Renny Harlin heads back to the deep blue — but this time the sharks aren’t the problem so much as the movie around them.
This return to shark-infested waters is a rote exercise compared to Harlin’s quirkier, “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), since “Deep Water” unspools as a by-the-numbers disaster flick. We’re introduced to a cast of personalities in Los Angeles, boarding a jumbo jet bound for Singapore. On the flight deck, Ben Kingsley is our captain, with a dutiful Aaron Eckhart as the first officer — one’s a karaoke-crooning charmer chasing a golden girl in every port; the other’s a straightlaced, former Air Force pilot with a few trauma skeletons in the closet. The X-factor in the misadventure is a bellicose, self-entitled slob (Angus Sampson) — basically everything that’s wrong with America — who chain-smokes wherever he pleases and leaves an e-device plugged into a charger in his checked luggage. Not good; you know it’s only a matter of time (though, given the film’s long developing arc, about halfway through the movie) before a fire breaks out in the hold and the plane goes down in the middle of the oceanic nowhere. A coral reef holds a few severed sections tenuously above water.
The crash also serves as a dinner bell for a shiver of ravenous sharks that take opportunistic pounds of flesh — limbs make for tasty hors d’oeuvres. The pat survivor-hell bears all the trappings of the cheesy, B-level disaster thrillers of the 1970s (“The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure”), but none of their lean-in bravado (and the special effects are lame, especially by today’s standards — “Sharknado” included).
Harlin cut his teeth on sequels in the “Die Hard” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises. He never really found a directorial footing to call his own, and most recently helmed the god-awful chapters of “The Strangers.” He again reverts to a banal retread that no one will remember.
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