‘Deep Water’ Review: When Airplane Disaster Meets Shark Thriller

One of the relatively new rules that airlines now enforce with increasing strictness concerns portable battery chargers. On many Asian routes, especially after a series of high-profile incidents in countries such as China and South Korea, airlines are extremely vigilant about passengers checking power banks in their luggage. If Deep Water has a takeaway beyond its thrills, it’s a simple one: never pack a power bank in your checked baggage—keep it with you in your carry-on. Beyond that, Deep Water is a Chinese-American co-production whose behind-the-scenes story is arguably more interesting than the movie itself: a reasonably well-made but ultimately forgettable disaster film that merges two familiar genres—airplane-crash survival and shark attack thriller.

The film also marks an unexpected milestone as Gene Simmons’ debut as a producer. Yes, that Gene Simmons, the long-tongued bassist from Kiss. Produced alongside Chinese companies, the project reflects its dual identity both on and off screen, featuring a mixed American and Chinese cast aboard a flight traveling from Los Angeles to Shanghai. The person most accustomed to straddling East and West, however, is director Renny Harlin. Once one of Hollywood’s premier action filmmakers thanks to Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Harlin’s career lost momentum after the spectacular failure of Cutthroat Island, the infamous pirate epic that reportedly cost around $100 million and barely made a dent at the box office.

Since then, Harlin has reinvented himself as a globe-trotting craftsman of international action movies, spending years working in China, where he directed several productions, including the successful Jackie Chan vehicle Skiptrace in 2016. More recently, he’s embraced the world of prolific B-movie filmmaking, directing The Strangers trilogy—three horror films shot back-to-back—and with The Beast and Black Tides already lined up. Within his filmography, the closest relative to Deep Water is probably Deep Blue Sea, another aquatic survival thriller that became a modest hit nearly three decades ago.

The premise of his new film simply fuses two classic disaster-movie formulas. First comes the aviation catastrophe. Then come the sharks.

The story begins routinely enough as the captain and first officer—played by Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart, two respected actors now firmly in the stage of their careers where prestige projects coexist with a steady stream of lower-budget genre films—prepare for a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. What neither of them knows is that an obnoxious American passenger (Angus Sampson) has checked a suitcase containing the one thing airlines repeatedly warn travelers never to put there: a power bank.

Harlin spends the opening act introducing a dozen largely interchangeable passengers: rival American and Chinese sports teams, a blended family with two stepbrothers, a kindly elderly woman, a young man trying to impress one of the flight attendants, and several other archetypes given just enough personality to register before the inevitable chaos begins. Once the aircraft is over the Pacific, the power bank overheats, igniting a fire that quickly escalates into an explosion. Soon the cabin is tearing apart, sections of the plane break away, and the aircraft begins disintegrating in midair. And that’s before the emergency water landing—the crew’s last remaining option once keeping the plane aloft is no longer possible.

This entire sequence is easily the film’s strongest stretch. Harlin’s instincts for staging large-scale action remain as sharp as ever, and he orchestrates the destruction with genuine suspense. The breakup of the aircraft is brutal, leaving roughly 80 percent of the passengers dead, whether trapped inside detached sections of the fuselage or hurled into the sky as the plane comes apart. Just over thirty survivors remain, scattered across the wreckage and desperately trying to stay alive. Unfortunately for them, the Pacific isn’t empty. A large school of sharks—apparently ravenous after weeks without a meal—begins picking off the survivors one by one, sometimes whole, sometimes in pieces.

That’s Deep Water in a nutshell: technically proficient where it counts, particularly during its major action set pieces, and almost entirely disposable everywhere else. The characters are thin, the emotional stakes barely register, the dialogue is perfunctory, and the screenplay serves mostly as connective tissue between increasingly elaborate survival scenarios. Even so, this is arguably the highest-profile film Harlin has directed in years, which explains why it received a theatrical release rather than disappearing straight into the digital abyss where so many contemporary B-movies quietly end up—on VOD platforms, streaming services, or the murkier corners of the internet. A fitting destination, perhaps, for a film about surviving in waters almost as unforgiving as the marketplace it inhabits.