Aaron Eckhart in Renny Harlin Disaster Movie

“One tiny spark becomes a night of blazing suspense!” That tagline from 1974’s The Towering Inferno could easily have been slapped on Renny Harlin’s Deep Water. Maybe combined with “You’ll Never Go in the Water Again!” from Jaws. Even The Poseidon Adventure’s classic “Hell, upside down!” might apply to a scene or two. While the director’s last studio hit, 1999’s Deep Blue Sea, shares shark DNA, the new thriller’s roots are deeply embedded in 1970s disaster movies, not least the truly dreadful Airport ’77. Or as dreadful as any movie featuring screen divinity Lee Grant and Brenda Vaccaro can be.

Given that the cutoff age in America for commercial airline pilots is 65, eyebrows might be raised by making 82-year-old Ben Kingsley the captain on a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Would you board? Rich is a failed husband still hitting on the ladies by crooning “Fly Me to the Moon” in karaoke bars, so it’s no wonder the plane goes down. But that exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

The prelude in a screenplay that took four writers — Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, SP Krause and Damien Power, plus a fifth, John Kim, for additional input, presumably with the Chinese characters — is struck directly from the ‘70s template. Once it kicks into gear, the story could almost be told in emojis: ✈️🔥😱🌊🦈🦈🦈💩.

A bunch of stock characters are given one-dimensional introductions, led by Aaron Eckhart’s Ben, a first officer whose failure to make captain by now might have something to do with hot-headedness in his Air Force days. A flawed hero with a firmly clenched jaw, he’s also caught in a bind of needing to make money to cover his young son’s cancer treatment but also possibly using the job to flee responsibility, leaving his desperate wife to deal with the anxiety alone.

The passengers include the requisite obnoxious jerk, Dan (Angus Sampson), already throwing his weight around and breaking no-smoking rules at LAX. We watch him stuff a glitchy charging device into his check-in luggage and then we follow his suitcase onto the conveyor belt and into the cargo hold, which doesn’t bode well. 

There’s a blended family, including kids Cora (Molly Belle Wright) and the younger stepbrother she barely tolerates, Finn (Elijah Tamati), and their frisky parents Declan (Ryan Bown) and Jaya (Kelly Gale). The couple disappears early in the flight to join the Mile High Club, leaving the children unattended, so in movie-morality logic, we can assume they’re toast.

The same appears to be true of douchey athlete Hutch (Lakota Johnson), whose aggressive behavior with Lilly (Zhao Simei) pisses off Sam (Li Wenhan), captain of the Esports team returning from a video gamer tournament. Official team rules prohibit them from dating, but you just know that near-death experiences are going to make these lovebirds take the plunge. Also because the Chinese co-financing requires it.

Australian screen and stage veteran Kate Fitzpatrick plays Becky, a feisty grandmother whose role is so familiar that her banter with geeky Matt across the aisle (Richard Croughley) will later include him good-naturedly dropping a Shelley Winters reference. That’s about it for the characters we need to care much about, though I would have liked to see more of tough but tender vet Martine (Madeleine West).

The key cabin crew are flight attendants Penny (Lucy Barrett) and Zoe (Na Shi), both of whom demonstrate bravery, to different ends, and show caring attention to the terrified children.

The cause of the plane’s malfunctions is, duh, random sparks from annoying Dan’s charger starting a fire in cargo. Harlin rediscovers some of his old Die Hard 2 mojo in the dizzying acceleration of violence as faulty equipment and then crew are unable to contain the blaze, gas cannisters start ricocheting through the cabin ripping a hole in the fuselage, hand luggage goes flying and the drinks cart contents turn into shrapnel. 

Any passengers not knocked out during the chaos or sucked out into the sky are generally screaming and grabbing for oxygen masks while Captain Rich makes a futile announcement about the importance of not panicking. This is basically every aerophobic flier’s worst nightmare, and Harlin does a solid job of maintaining the fear factor and shock right up to the moment of Rich’s decision to dump fuel and ditch, since the nearest airport, Guam, is out of range. 

The director again shows his action smarts by creating a brief lull — albeit while leaning hard on one of the more sudsy passages of composer Fernando Velázquez’s generic score — before the next shuddering impact sends the number of casualties skyrocketing.  

The plane hitting the water is destructive enough without the help of a jagged coral reef (improbably far from any coastline) slicing through the aircraft’s undercarriage. By the time Ben looks around at the floating wreckage, he estimates that of the 257 souls on board, maybe 30 survived. That number will keep shrinking as vicious mako sharks start picking off passengers while they pray to be rescued.

Considering how much Harlin dialed up the shark mayhem in the ridiculous but toothsome B-movie Deep Blue Sea, the bloodletting and severed limbs here are a tad routine for the genre — dorsal fins slicing the water; floating passengers circled and suddenly yanked under; pools of blood forming when unfortunate folks try swimming to relative safety; bursts of thrashing; and some scary underwater shots. It’s no Jaws, obviously, but sharksploitation addicts will have seen much worse, and the film will do fine once it lands on streaming. 

The focus narrows in on the remaining passengers and crew in the main sections of the aircraft not blown to bits, the cockpit and a stretch of the main cabin (finally, a reward for flying coach), precariously perched on a reef outcrop. 

The human drama tends to veer into corniness, though emotional investment is sufficient to keep you watching, and not paying too much attention to the flat light often left behind by green screen removal. Or to some shaky American accents that keep lapsing. 

(The movie was shot in New Zealand and the Canary Islands, and the production led by Australian companies, with much of the secondary cast assembled there. It was initially planned as a sequel to 2012’s sharks-in-a-flooded-supermarket 3D chomper, Bait, but that version was shelved due to uncomfortable similarities to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014.)

While there’s some teasing suspense in how long the odious Dan will be kept alive, it’s not exactly surprising that Ben will have his parental instincts reactivated by Cora’s vulnerability. What’s more unexpected is that Chinese fishermen get to be the good guys.