With his new feature “Deep Water”, Renny Harlin reaches back to a popular movie from his early directing days in search of some return-to-glory magic. The Finnish filmmaker established himself with two popular action movie gems from the early 1990s, “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger”. But since then his career has had its share of misfires along with one notorious box office bomb. One of the exceptions was 1999’s “Deep Blue Sea”, an enjoyable killer shark movie with a fanbase that has only grown over time.

“Deep Water” sees Harlin dipping his toes back into the shark-infested cinematic waters, although this time without the science fiction angle from his previous film. Instead, he goes the full survival thriller route, mixing in some 1970s disaster cinema, while embracing the absurdity that makes shark flicks so diverting. The results – pure popcorn entertainment with the kind of throwback pleasures that many of us grew up loving.

“Deep Water” features an especially wild scenario which Harlin uses to its fullest. Co-written by Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, and Damien Power, the story follows one ill-fated international flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. As with most movies of its kind, it begins with a series of scenes that give us one-dimensional introductions to specific passengers and crew members. Of course all will factor into the peril that lies only a few scenes away.

Tops on the cast list is Aaron Eckhart who plays Ben, the flight’s First Officer and the film’s flawed protagonist. Ben has yet to make captain for reasons that are referenced more than reckoned with. More notable is how he uses work to avoid going home despite the desperate pleas of his wife. We learn they have a young son with cancer and a struggling Ben is doing everything but face that reality. So he stays in the air, this time alongside the equally flawed Captain Rich (Ben Kingsley).

Among the passengers is Dan (Angus Sampson), the mandatory scumbag we all hope gets eaten. There’s the recently married Declan (Ryan Bown) and Jaya (Kelly Gale) along with their children from other marriages, his sulky daughter Cora (Molly Belle Wright) and her outgoing son Finn (Elijah Tamati). There are Esports players Sam (Li Wenhan) and Lilly (Zhao Simei) who butt heads with obnoxious jock Hutch (Lakota Johnson). And we get a spirited grandmother played by Australian screen and stage legend Kate Fitzpatrick.

Other players include the brave and dutiful flight attendants, Zoe (Na Shi) and Penny (Lucy Barrett), a nerdy PC gamer, Matt (Richard Croughley), and a kind-hearted veterinarian named Martine (Madeleine West), as well as others. They all are among the 257 souls onboard the doomed commercial airliner. The trouble starts when a fire in the cargo bay sets off a violent chain of events that sends the plane plunging towards the Pacific Ocean.

Harlin lets loose in crafting a truly harrowing crash sequence that is keenly shot and furiously edited. The fire sends air tanks ripping through the plane, tearing a hole in the fuselage. Bottles from snack carts and overhead luggage fly through the cabin with lethal precision. The engines burst into flames. The belly rips open from a jagged coral reef as the plane skids across the deep waters. It’s Harlin at his best, keeping us glued to every sharply detailed and utterly terrifying moment.

But the scenario only gets worse from there. Within the massive wreckage, passengers and crew frantically scramble to escape from different sections of the splintered plane. Ben tallies the number of survivors to around thirty. But in a movie like this we know that number is going to dwindle fast. Especially when the dead bodies in the waters around them form a feeding ground for hungry and hyper-aggressive mako sharks.

Regardless of how crazy it sounds, Harlin keeps us invested by maintaining a steady edge-of-your-seat tension as he moves us from one silly yet terrifying encounter to another. But his biggest trick is in making us care about the remaining survivors despite their archetypal limitations. We care because Harlin cares about them too, and it comes across in the semblance of human drama he creates in nearly every life and each death.

Now I don’t want to overstate the humanity in a movie that so proudly makes fun its main focus. But there are emotional stakes and the movie is surprisingly sensitive (right through to its overly sugary ending). But at its core, “Deep Water” is a ‘disaster movie meets sharksploitation’ and it makes no apologies. It’s full of clever visual choices, plenty of gnarly kills, and a top-to-bottom committed cast who very much understand the assignment. Mark this one down as one of the bigger surprises of the year so far.

VERDICT – 4 STARS