By Fiorela Gonzales

Deep Water is a survival shark movie that has its highest points of the film during the plane crash itself and dwindles into less exciting territory with the actual shark survival. It’s Final Destination meets a wannabe Jaws, where the characters are less well formed than the CGI sharks.

The film stars Aaron Eckhart as Ben, the flight’s first officer, who has a confounding backstory as to why he is indeed the first officer and not yet the captain. He seemingly also has another backstory as the father of a son dying of cancer and instead of going home to be with his wife and sick child, he begs to be put on another flight which puts him on the Northeastern Airlines flight from LA to Shanghai along with Captain Rich (Ben Kingsley) who doesn’t seem to know what type of movie he is in.

The flight manifest includes a roster of one note characters that make up the film’s core cast. First is Cora, a young girl upset with her father for remarrying and giving her a new stepmother and stepbrother, Finn. Then is Dan, the villain of the story, who was created in a lab to have the most irredeemable qualities and be truly unlikable from every angle. There’s Matt, the young guy who’s attracted to flight attendant Zoey, who’s sat next to an older grandmother, Becky, who seems to hate Matt for having a terrible personality. (Something she surmises from the fact that he’s on his laptop on a flight and doesn’t strike up conversation with her.) Then there are the members of the Chinese esports team, Lily and Sam who from the beginning of the film are fighting with Hutch, a member of the rival American esports team. There are a few other passengers who seem to be important to the story, but we don’t learn their names or much else about them.

A fire, caused by the villain of the story Dan’s faulty portable charger, breaks out in the aircraft’s cargo hold which ultimately leads to an explosion that destroys the plane’s engines. As the plane descends, Captain Rich lands on the water and would have successfully maneuvered a Sully, except for the surprise coral reef which rips the plane into 3 parts and kills most of the passengers in the crash. Captain Rich gets his leg stuck in the cock pit and decides to go down with the ship, which leads first officer Ben to assume the position of captain for the remaining survivors. For those who lived though, the worst is yet to come as a CGI horde of man-eating sharks are circling the crash like an all you can eat buffet and everyone is on the menu.

This is a bozo movie at its best. It’s dumb, it’s silly, the characters are all one note and provide nothing besides being lunch food for the sharks, and the ending is just a “sure” shrug. At one point someone says to newly appointed Captain Ben, “are you going to do anything besides wait for help to come?” and it appears the answer to that is a resounding no. The film centers itself on being trapped in the middle of the ocean surrounded by hungry sharks who only eat plot convenient characters. There quite literally is nothing the captain can do besides hope help comes, so when help does come, the movie just sort of ends. They do try to do a little bit of a surprise survivor at the end, but it doesn’t pull it off as well as it hopes. The film also completely forgets about some of its characters we’ve met that at least have names. There are a few characters who, I presume, were killed offscreen? It’s not a hard leap to assume they were eaten by sharks, but why did we learn about these characters to not know how they die? The answer to that is probably due to the 5 names that show up for the “written by” credits. It is clear a few things were lost and forgotten about through many iterations of this script.

The character development of this story is subpar at best and given mostly to somehow Hutch, the American esports athlete that spends most of his runtime fighting with the Chinese esports team. Captain Ben ends the film on an emotional note of “coming home for his family” as he talks to his sick son on the phone (also, mind you, everyone’s phones survived the plane crash and shark attack). It appears his personal growth through the film is “decides to stop avoiding his dying son”. Also, the confounding backstory for why he was never captain in the first place never really comes back up.

To give it its credit, the Final Destination-esque of the plane crash is one of its high points. The VFX and CGI budget seems to have lasted only through that sequence though as the rest of the film looks like a green screen sunset with fake sharks that somehow keep multiplying. It’s unclear how many sharks there are, but after the crash there’s seemingly 1 or 2 who attack everyone. Yet at the end of the film there’s seemingly 100 who don’t attack any of the survivors.

Overall, Deep Water is full bozo fun. If you’re going into it wanting to watch one-note characters get ripped and shredded, then you’ll have a good time. Though, if you’re looking for a fight to the death survival movie that came out in the past month where a major plot point is a faulty portable charger, then I would actually recommend Pizza Movie (2026).

2 ½ stars.