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Director Renny Harlin has a new shark-attack movie out called Deep Water. It’s only fair that he would get another shot at this subgenre as it seemingly resurges in popularity; Harlin made a particularly good one 27 years ago with Deep Blue Sea. But today’s shark movies tend to be more contained, like Netflix’s recent Thrash, the Blake Lively-starring The Shallows, or the serial-killer riff Dangerous Animals. Deep Water is a more ambitious production than any of those.
It’s also not as good as any of them — maybe because, like the genetically modified carnivores of Deep Blue Sea, Harlin is a creature of the ’90s. He made his career during a transitional decade for mainstream American cinema, recruited from his native Finland to serve stars and special effects in equal measure. That’s how he wound up making a blockbuster sequel (Die Hard 2), a Sylvester Stallone comeback vehicle (Cliffhanger), a record money-loser (Cutthroat Island), and a cult-classic love letter to then-wife Geena Davis (The Long Kiss Goodnight) all within the space of a decade. (There was also an Andrew Dice Clay vehicle somewhere in there, but best not to talk about that.)
In his heyday, Harlin specialized in movies that required slick efficiency behind the camera, but nothing that would get in the way of a star’s ego or an expensively quippy script. (Shane Black’s Long Kiss Goodnight screenplay fetched a record price at the time.) Harlin’s films look tremendously well-crafted now, even though they were considered junk food at the time.
As the ’90s ended with one of the more spectacular years for cinema of the past half-century, Harlin joined filmmakers like Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Michael Mann in releasing a magnum opus. Deep Blue Sea made more money than any of those auteurs’ films. It also brought Harlin right to the edge of the leveled-up approach to franchising fantasy and superhero movies that dawned in 2000s Hollywood. Fittingly, Deep Blue Sea was Harlin’s final big-studio hit. There are still B-movie artisans at work in today’s big studios, but typically not at the bigger-budget level where a disaster-horror hybrid like Deep Water might flourish.
Maybe that absence has helped Deep Blue Sea endure beyond its place in the summer of 1999. The element that’s stuck around longest out of context is the showstopping mid-film scene centered on Samuel L. Jackson (a frequent Harlin star) as Russell Franklin, a corporate flak who’s survived the movie’s first round of shark-based disaster. Russell gives an intense mid-movie monologue about unity during catastrophe, meant to inspire his fellow survivors to band together for survival. Instead, he’s interrupted when one of the sharks pops up and unceremoniously (or, considering how memorable the moment is, quite ceremoniously) devours him.
But the film’s longevity as a creature-feature favorite isn’t due to just one scene. Harlin is one of the few giant-shark movie directors to understand that directly echoing the fundamentals of Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws is a fool’s game. Instead, Harlin uses his experience on Nightmare on Elm Street and Die Hard sequels to proceed as if he’s making his own ante-upping late-stage Jaws sequel, with gnarly deaths, elaborate sci-fi production design, and perfectly contained silliness.
Deep Blue Sea is far better than the actual Jaws follow-ups — it’s an uncommonly satisfying creature feature. Harlin is aware of the special place his movie holds in many hearts; when I spoke with him in 2024 about The Strangers: Chapter 1, he happily chatted about Deep Blue Sea’s upcoming 25th anniversary. So while Harlin has kept a lower profile since the dawn of the 21st century, directing a combination of misfires, smaller-scale action movies, and that inexplicable Strangers reboot trilogy, the prospect of him returning to shark-infested waters is enticing.
Though Deep Water looks like a direct-to-streaming movie, and one without a designated up-and-comer like Phoebe Dynevor from Thrash, its premise is pretty irresistible. A pilot (Ben Kingsley) and his traumatized co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart) crash-land in the ocean halfway between Los Angeles and Shanghai, and must do their best to gather the survivors and keep them safe from underwater predators as they attempt to signal for help. (The combination of rescue effort and shark avoidance brings to mind a classic Norm Macdonald Weekend Update joke.) Even more than Deep Blue Sea, Deep Water combines elements of an old-fashioned disaster movie with the inevitable fact that some characters will be eaten by sharks.
It’s not fair to expect Harlin to recapture that Deep Blue Sea magic on what is clearly a much lower budget. Then again, some of the best moments in his Strangers trilogy, particularly in the much-maligned middle chapter, do a lot with a little: cool lighting, slick camera moves, and minimal dialogue. So it’s dispiriting to gradually realize that Deep Water does not have the killer instinct of Harlin’s best previous films. The shark attacks don’t have much personality (though they do provide even more thrashing than Thrash), and the characters aren’t much better.
Harlin is clearly aiming more for the kind of disaster-movie cornball sincerity associated with Roland Emmerich, rather than the ruthless thrills of his earlier shark adventure. Some of the new material is enjoyable in its shamelessness. A shy pair of teenagers struggle to admit their mutual attraction. Eckhart comforts and protects a little girl whose parents may be lost to the briny deep. Angus Sampson, from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and the Insidious films, makes an absurdly hissable villain passenger who exists entirely to behave badly enough to assure his shark death plays as a payoff.
But the most exciting element of Renny Harlin making a new shark-attack movie is not his ability to approximate the cheap feels of a second-tier disaster movie. Plenty of fans will watch Deep Water hoping for an exercise in slick genre style. On those terms, the film peaks early with an effective plane-crash sequence, and the creative ways the plane breaks apart in the water, serving different factions of passengers as a life raft or prospective tomb.
Once the sharks actually enter the picture, though, the movie is left with the familiar contemporary shark-movie problem of janky-looking CG animals that must attack in an erratic blur so they can be hustled off-screen as quickly as possible. The CG sharks in Deep Blue Sea weren’t convincing either, but their size and ridiculous craftiness made them work as larger-than-life creatures. (They also weren’t depicted exclusively via computer effects.) Deep Water’s attempts at realism, including an emotional subplot involving one pilot’s unseen sickly child, do the film no favors.
Harlin hasn’t exactly made a pale imitation of his best movie. In spite of Eckhart’s channeling the temperament of Deep Blue Sea star Thomas Jane, Deep Water’s earnest, sometimes even sentimental tone does set it apart from its unofficial predecessor. That different tone ultimately just doesn’t boast any particular advantages, at least not at the theatrical-release price point as opposed to a give-it-a-shot streaming platform. Deep Water is more like the movie plenty of people probably assumed Deep Blue Sea would be like in the first place: watchable, forgettable shlock.
Deep Water debuts in theaters on May 1.
