A One Mann’s Movies review of “Deep Water”. (2026, 2.5*, 15).

What’s cheesier than an cheesy Airplane!-like disaster movie? What’s cheesier than a cheesy low-budget shark picture? The answer is a cheesy Airplane!-like disaster movie with added sharks! Not to be confused with the Ben Affleck/Ana De Armas erotic thriller from 2022, this Deep Water is wonderfully mis-named since, taking the title in its literal sense, they crash land on a reef and are never in deep water!

The director is the Die Hard director Renny Harlin, who also directed the successful Deep Blue Sea in 1999, so he has form on shark movies. However, his portfolio of films since that date has been less than stellar.

One Mann’s Movies Rating:

Plot:

Pilot Rich (Ben Kingsley) and Ben (Aaron Eckhart) are at the controls of a flight from LA to Shanghai when disaster strikes. Forced to ditch at sea, the survivors have another peril to contend with… sharks!

Certification:

UK: 15; US: R. (From the BBFC website: “strong threat, violence, injury detail.” I mean, yes… but the violence is delivered in such a ludicrously cheesy way that it almost passes muster for a 12A.)

Talent:

Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Ben Kingsley, Angus Sampson, Lucy Barrett, Richard Crouchley, Molly Belle Wright, Wenhan Li, Rosie Simei Zhao, Nashi, Lakota Johnson, Kate Fitzpatrick, Elijah Tamati.

Directed by: Renny Harlin.

Written by: Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, Damien Power, John Kim. (Story by Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause. Additional writers for Chinese character storyline and dialogue by Dan Luo & Jianye Sun.)

Running Time: 1h 46m.

Review:

Positives:

• Aaron Eckhart, with his traditional square-jawed good looks, does his best with the material he has to work with. But it is Ben Kingsley who adds a bit of much-needed gravitas to the proceedings.
• Sometimes cheese is good. And this film drips cheese. The film is really, really close to that subtle line of being “so bad it’s good”.

Negatives:

• You can almost click through the clichés, from the co-pilot (Aaron Ackroyd) with (never fully explained) home issues to the asshole Dan (who you just can’t wait to see die horribly) to the couple with un-requieted love to the Shelley Winters-style granny from The Poseidon Adventure. A highpoint is when the parents of Cora and Finn, just before disaster strikes, leave both their kids alone to go off to join the mile-high-club in the toilets. Bad parents… BAD! The cheese is partly the reason why this scores more than I really feel it should do. But, on the other hand, it is a pretty terrible film!
• The film is about as unsubtle as a baseball bat to the face. You know within the first two minutes exactly what is going to bring the plane down (yep, it’s that asshole Dan who you can’t wait to see have his face chewed off). A final reel rescue is semaphored from about 10 minutes in. You know that the Chinese couple (Rosie Simei Zhao and Wenhan Li), desperately struggling between true-love and team-duties, will either get it together at the end or be cruelly split into many pieces… one or the other.
• The special effects range from OK to ropy. The film has the most egregious use of a plastic shark attacking a dingy (see the web-post picture) that I have seen in many a shark film. It makes Spielberg’s “Bruce” look like the real thing.
• The involvement of Chinese investors, keen to see the film do well in their home market no doubt, is also self-evident. The plane is flying from LA to Shanghai, giving lots of opportunity for a native-speaking sports team to be onboard as well as some cute ethnic-Chinese cabin staff (one is a “9” and out of Matt’s league, according to Shelley-Winters-granny-lady). And who provides the ultimate rescue after the stupid Americans fuck it up? You’ve guessed it, a Chinese vessel.

Summary Thoughts:

It’s a cheese-fest combination of a airplane disaster and shark movie. I watched this as an “ironing movie”: not a metaphor for anything else… it’s a movie I can put on while I’m ironing my mountain of shirts! And it succeeded in entertaining me for the purposes of that: in the main by helping me generate hoots of mocking laughter. I will have to find out what the ‘cheesy-shark-film lady’, Emma Sewell, from our Flickering Dreams podcast made of it! I predict a 10/10!

The film started streaming on Prime Video early last month.

Where to watch?

Trailer

The trailer for the film is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ptq0Lzdh8

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