Whatever happened to Renny Harlin, director of beloved studio-produced action programmers like Cliffhanger and Deep Blue Sea? Harlin’s career has since taken some unexpected turns, including the recent Strangers prequel trilogy as well as the dopey but sturdy 2023 John Wick-sploitation potboiler The Bricklayer, starring Aaron Eckhart as a CIA-agent-turned-construction-worker. Now, Eckhart and Harlin reteam for the quaint, but solid airplane crash survival thriller Deep Water, which features an impressive mix of practical and special effects and a mostly well-synthesized combination of old-school melodrama and modern cynical humor.
As in The Bricklayer, Eckhart, Harlin, and their collaborators rarely condescend to viewers by assuming we’re smarter than a diligently executed B-movie formula. If anything, the main thing holding Deep Water back is its sometimes belabored, but mostly refreshing dedication to ensemble drama sentimentality, especially whenever trope-dependent characterizations and threadbare dialogue suggest a “we’re all in it together” esprit de corps that would fit right in with classic disaster pics like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
As the stalwart First Officer Ben, Eckhart projects Big Daddy Energy throughout, even before he joins Captain Rich (Ben Kingsley) on board an ill-fated trip from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Like Ben, Rich means well and takes his job seriously. They also both seem to like people enough to want to reassure them and even take responsibility whenever somebody has to make a judgment call. This is, after all, their job.
It’s still refreshing to see both men take their obligations seriously, not just out of professional responsibility, but because they want to set a good example, like when Ben tries to reassure the snarky but worried gradeschooler Cora (Molly Wright), who’s traveling with her father (Ryan Brown), stepmother (Kelly Gale), and stepbrother Finn (Elijah Tamati). For Ben, Cora’s an opportunity to be a good dad by proxy since his own family members aren’t on the flight while Cora’s family, like a couple dozen other passengers, needs help after their plane crashes.
Eckhart’s gallant behavior appears to be infectious, or at least representative of how the plane’s passengers speak to each other with good-natured bonhomie, save for loudmouth whiner Dan (Angus Sampson), who grumbles constantly about everything that’s inconveniencing him. Everyone else speaks to each other with unusual sensitivity, even if their polished repartee never exactly sounds realistic.
Sometimes the survivors’ cheery badinage is laced with a fratty sense of humor, like when lonely grandma Becky (Kate Fitzpatrick) jokes with tetchy singleton Matt (Richard Crouchley) that he shouldn’t bother trying to make-cute with a flight attendant (producer Chrissy Jin) since the smiling crewmember’s way out of his league. Other times, the characters speak to each other with an unfiltered sappiness, which thankfully never becomes so excessive as to be distracting, as with the bond that unites Chinese high school athletes Lilly (Zhao Simei) and Sam (Li Wenhan). One might think that humor’s the thing needed to boost Lilly and Sam’s will-they/won’t-they tension, but Deep Water‘s jokes are of variable quality, even if a few stray misfires wind up being unintentionally amusing, like when Cora’s dad and Finn’s mom unsuccessfully try to sneak into the Mile High Club without attracting their kids’ attention.
That said, Lilly and Sam’s sudsy romance helps to set viewers’ expectations, since several other characters, including Becky and Ben, also express themselves in syrupy or over-earnest ways. There’s also thankfully enough circumstantial peril to offset the characters’ tacky displays of affection for each other.
Harlin’s at his ghoulish best when he’s toying with viewers’ emotions during the shark-centric scenes of Deep Water, the best of which will make you holler with glee given their crowd-pleasing, over-the-top violence. The extended plane crash sequence is also mostly satisfying given its suggestive mix of digital and practical effects and unsettling sound design. If anything, Harlin only seems to be held back in this regard by his film’s limited budget, which stretches a little thin whenever dead human bodies and computer-animated sharks briefly dip into view. The filmmakers still know that the key to making this type of movie work is to make viewers want to suspend their disbelief long enough to hope for the best while expecting the worst for Ben and his fellow survivors.
With a soothing voice and brighter-than-average star power charisma, Eckhart reminds viewers that he’s never too good to be unabashedly corny—a virtue that persists even in films like I, Frankenstein. In this case, Eckhart exudes the sort of unselfconscious paternal energy that’s needed to keep things moving in between the familiar, but well-executed disaster movie story beats. He almost single-handedly makes Deep Water a better-than-average genre exercise, though the bloody shark attacks and corny banter don’t hurt either.
Director: Renny Harlin
Writer: Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, Damien Power
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Angus Sampson, Ben Kingsley
Release Date: May 1, 2026
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