\n\tWhen a once-successful director finds himself stranded in a wilderness of misguided projects and indifferent audience response, he may try to reignite inspiration by going back to the ingredients of an iconic hit. If he can replicate the perfect storm of elements that made the earlier film work, maybe the new movie will put him back on top.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis kind of thing happens often enough \u2014\u00a0examples range from William Friedkin shooting for a West Coast \u201cFrench Connection\u201d with \u201cTo Live and Die in L.A.\u201d to John McTiernan making \u201cDie Hard with a Vengeance.\u201d But we\u2019re in a far more degraded realm of return-to-glory-days syndrome when it\u2019s Renny Harlin<\/a> out to recapture the low-trash spark of \u201cDeep Blue Sea<\/a>,\u201d his well-liked exploitation action thriller. Talk about a 1999 movie that wasn\u2019t about the brave new movie future!<\/p>\n \n\tIt was about killer sharks (with enhanced intelligence!) eating people, and about a scientific experiment \u2014\u00a0something to do with curing Alzheimer\u2019s \u2014 that was there to fill up the space between chompings. But \u201cDeep Blue Sea,\u201d whose big star was Thomas Jane, went down as a summer sleeper (it bit its way to $73 million domestic), and the nostalgic fondness that a lot of people have for it surely fed into why we\u2019re now getting \u201cDeep Water<\/a>\u201d (opening May 1), Harlin\u2019s most lavishly scaled production in quite some time. <\/p>\n \n\tIn the 1970s, disaster films had titles that described exactly what they were. \u201cThe Towering Inferno\u201d was about a towering inferno, \u201cEarthquake\u201d was about an earthquake, and then there were films like \u201cMeteor\u201d and \u201cAvalanche\u201d and \u201cThe Swarm\u201d and \u201cThe Hindenburg\u201d and \u201cCity on Fire.\u201d In that spirit, \u201cDeep Water,\u201d which is very much a neo-\u201970s disaster film. should have been called \u201cAirplane Crash into a Sea of Jaws.\u201d As it stands, the word in the film\u2019s generic title that echoes that earlier Harlin movie is more than a bit ironic, since \u201cdeep\u201d is just the word to describe what Renny Harlin\u2019s movies are not. They are shallow. They are dramatically flat. They do not have interesting characters even on a schlock B-movie level. As a director, he has a sixth sense for how to reduce actors to walking slabs of pulp.<\/p>\n \n\tYet there\u2019s no denying that Renny Harlin, in his utilitarian action-hack way, has some chops. \u201cDeep Water\u201d starts out by introducing the main players on an intercontinental flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Aaron Eckhart<\/a>, with his likable downcast valor, is the First Officer, a stalwart fellow who\u2019s a bit of a ne\u2019er-do-well (that\u2019s why he\u2019s never become a captain); he\u2019s suffering from an oblique family trauma we can kind of suss out. Ben Kingsley<\/a> is the captain, a jaded overseer on the verge of retirement who is introduced singing \u201cFly Me to the Moon\u201d in a karaoke bar, where he somehow imagines that his crooning is going to have a seductive effect on the flight attendants seated at a table. (The truth is that he looks rather frighting in his sand-brown goatee.)<\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019re also introduced to the passengers, who are real Jane and Johnny one-notes, though we do take special notice of Dan (Angus Sampson), a long-haired slovenly bellicose chain smoker whose bulky red plastic suitcase the camera tracks onto the plane. For a while, we think it must have a bomb in it. It doesn\u2019t, but it does contain something that randomly ignites, setting a fire in the cargo pod, which becomes an explosion, which ricochets into the cabin, at which point a hole gets blown in the side, one of the engines catches fire, and this thing is going down.<\/p>\n \n\tIt doesn\u2019t take excessive skill to make a plane crash scary, but Harlin executes this one with stylish flamboyance, as bodies get sucked out of the plane and flying wine bottles turn into shrapnel. Our heroes want to try landing at an airport in Guam, but that plan goes out the window, as they barely manage to ground the plane in the middle of the ocean.<\/p>\n \n\tThere were 257 passengers aboard, all but about 30 of whom are now dead. The plane is in pieces, the main two chunks being the cockpit and the fuselage, both of which have been reduced to floating canisters with wires popping out of the sides. The plane\u2019s pieces are now, in effect, life rafts (though there are some actual oversize yellow inflatable rafts aboard that will come into play). If the proper distress signal was set off (there\u2019s some question about whether that happened), they should be rescued in a matter of hours. But until then\u2026sharks!<\/p>\n \n\tThey are mako sharks, which to my movie-trained eyes don\u2019t look all that different from the great white shark in \u201cJaws,\u201d as they flop their giant razor-toothed mouths aboard the rafts. \u201cJaws\u201d was scary because it was about anticipation and sudden fear and the power of suggestion. \u201cDeep Water,\u201d on the other hand, has little in the way of suggestion, which is why it\u2019s more gory than scary. Harlin stages the shark attacks in an overt here-ya-go way, with the one consistent suspense issue being whether the shark will consume a victim whole or bite off his or her limb or simply leave them with a nasty gash (which happens quite often).<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, two bros (one American, one Chinese) start off as enemies but get over that, the scurrilous Dan continues to assert what a dick he is by smoking and snapping at everyone, and Eckhart\u2019s character bonds with Cora (Molly Belle Wright), the now-orphaned young girl aboard, which triggers a reappraisal of his own domestic situation. Human drama! Not. (Or, at least, not very much.) Yet there\u2019s a way in which it matters not, since even back in the \u201970s the \u201chuman drama\u201d of disaster films was just the frame on which to hang the sensationalist fantasy of death porn and survival. \u201cDeep Water\u201d isn\u2019t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a once-successful director finds himself stranded in a wilderness of misguided projects and indifferent audience response, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[193646,108605,193647,26913,146,85,46,397,26914],"class_list":{"0":"post-409869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-aaron-eckhart","9":"tag-ben-kingsley","10":"tag-deep-blue-sea","11":"tag-deep-water","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-renny-harlin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}