There’s no question that there have been a lot of shark movies released over the last twenty years or so. It’s a well Hollywood keeps going back to, as ever since Jaws in 1975 pretty much created the modern blockbuster, shark movies have become a reliable genre. However, shark movies do tend to get relegated to streaming, with even big-budget recent examples like Thrash and Under Paris heading there.
Yet, Renny Harlin, who made one of the all-time best shark movies, Deep Blue Sea, is taking a big swing this weekend with the release of Deep Water. A kind of mash-up of the disaster movie genre and shark thrillers, it follows a group of international passengers whose plane is forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters. Aaron Eckhart plays the heroic, hard-living first officer who is forced to pull people together in order to survive.
In advance of its May 1 release date (it’s being released as counter-programming to the more date-skewed The Devil Wears Prada 2), we’ve been given an exclusive clip showing the movie’s big plane crash sequence, where pilot Ben Kingsley and Eckhart try to keep the plane together before facing a particularly hungry, ocean-based threat.
We’ll be back with a review of Deep Water later this week, but this clip certainly makes it look like a fun little movie, and Harlin is no doubt a good fit for the material (it’s also produced by Gene Simmons of KISS fame). It looks like a high-concept return to action after Harlin spent the last few years pulling together his ambitious Strangers trilogy. My hope is Harlin cranks out an old-school action shoot-’em-up next, as we need the guy who made Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger back in high-concept action ASAP.
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