Deep Water

Harlin has had a long and uneven career leading up to this. Though he isn’t quite old enough to have tackled Deep Water back in 1979, he did make Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 in the 1990s, and this feels like a kind of spiritual successor to those star-driven action movies.

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

This picture is not as ridiculous as a “Sharknado” movie — Harlin is out to make a genuine nail-biter, and he largely succeeds, maintaining interest even as the two-hour mark approaches. But it’s not enough to make you genuinely afraid to go into the ocean this summer.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

Forget anything new. Director Renny Harlin is merely spitpolishing his same old bag of shark tricks. But the dude knows how to deliver assembly line product like nobody’s business.

Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.