YNOT at the Movies

After watching "Deep Water" (Spain/New Zealand/USA/China 2026 | 110 min.), you might think twice before boarding an airplane, and that is precisely the kind of unease a disaster film should leave behind. Renny Harlin, the director who gave us "Die Hard 2" (1990) and "Deep Blue Sea" (1999), knows this genre very well, and the film's airplane crash sequence is among the more viscerally effective set pieces he has staged in recent years. The cabin buckles, the ocean rushes up to meet the fuselage, and for a breathless stretch of minutes, the chaos feels convincing enough. Practical stunts lend the sequence a tactile credibility that the rest of the film, unfortunately, does not always sustain.

Ben (Aaron Eckhart) is a first officer on an LA-to-Shanghai flight with its captain Rich (Ben Kingsley). When a fire tears through the aircraft, the plane plunges into the ocean. Besides Ben, the survivors clinging to the wreckage include the captain of a Chinese sport team Sheng (Li Wenhan) and his teammate Lilly (Rosie Zhao) who has a crush on him, the insufferable fellow passenger Dan (Angus Sampson), and a mix of others simply trying to stay afloat long enough to be rescued. The wait, however, proves far more dangerous than anyone anticipated, as Mako sharks begin to circle, and it ultimately takes a passing Chinese fishing boat to bring the ordeal to a close.

Once the fuselage settles on the surface, the film pivots into a second chapter of aquatic survival that is effective in bursts but uneven in execution. The choice of Mako sharks over the more familiar great white is a smart one on paper: Makos are faster, more aggressive, and sport a particularly nightmarish tangle of hooked teeth. In practice, the sharks are largely CGI, and while the jump scares land with reasonable, gruesome reliability, the computer-generated creatures never quite shake the artificiality that keeps the tension from fully boiling over. The sound design does much of the heavy lifting, giving each attack a percussive physicality the visuals cannot always match.

Where the film falls short is in the quieter stretches between attacks, where Deep Water reaches, with mixed results, for the emotional depth of the 1970s disaster films that clearly inspired it. None of the characters leave a strong impression. Aaron Eckhart leads the film with a steady enough presence, but the script gives him nowhere interesting to go. Ben Kingsley, an Academy Award winner capable of commanding a scene with very little, is frustratingly underused. And Dan (Angus Sampson), a passenger whose naked selfishness makes him the most grating figure in the water, exists more as an irritant than a dramatic counterweight. The ensemble floats, but it never truly connects.

This is emphatically not Jaws (1975). It does not have that film's patience, wit, or understanding of how dread is built slowly and then released all at once. Composer Fernando Velázquez wisely avoids chasing John Williams' immortal shadow, but the score, like much of the film, is competent rather than memorable. The human drama never lands with the force it needs to, and what the screenplay gestures toward as character depth is little more than a surface ripple.

This is a passable genre exercise from a director who has made better films and who is clearly capable of more. It delivers on the crash and the creatures, which is more than some shark thrillers manage, but it leaves its talented cast and its more ambitious ideas stranded somewhere between spectacle and substance, never quite rescuing either. Watchable, occasionally gripping, and ultimately forgettable, it is the cinematic equivalent of surviving a wreck only to tread water for the remainder.

"Deep Water" opens in theaters on Friday, May 1, 2026.