In the now 50+ years since Jaws was released to an unwitting public in the summer of 1975, subsequent shark movies have felt the need to up the ante — quantity over quality, generally speaking — in order to entice the public back to the water, as it were. There have been films involving multiple sharks (47 Meters Down, The Requin, Open Water, et al.), prehistoric monster sharks (The Meg 1 & 2), genetically enhanced sharks (Deep Blue Sea), strangely recriminating sharks (Jaws: The Revenge), French sharks (Under Paris), grocery-shopping sharks (Bait), several peculiar weather-stricken sharks (Sharknado 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and not-nearly-as-bad-as-a-human-serial-killer sharks (Dangerous Animals), to name but a few.
It all feels perhaps a skooch played out, by this point, especially since an enormous percentage of such post-Jaws flicks (including several of the Jaws’ sequels) have been mindless, idiotic moneygrabs, with shameful CGI effects, and a slew of wooden, one-dimensional characters to use as chum in the water. This aggressively bland film is next in a long line of grubby, shoddy and spiritless fare — in fact, it’s not even the first film to have come up with a plane crash in the Pacific as its primary hook (2024’s No Way Out) .
Action-movie veteran Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, the afore-mentioned Deep Blue Sea) certainly knows the paces for such a production: Briefly introduce your soon-to-be-endangered characters, including (we’ll just dispense with names here and go for character trope type) The Weary Pilot (Ben Kingsley); the Emotionally Estranged First Officer (Aaron Eckhart); the Jaded Little Girl (Molly Belle Wright), and her Sweetly Innocent Stepbrother (Elijah Tamati); the Shy E-Sports Captain (Wenhan Li), deeply in unspoken love with fellow team member, Brave E-Sports Girl (Rosie Zhao); the Macho College Athlete (Lakota Johnson), who initially mocks E-Sports Captain before realizing they’re not so different, after all; the Sassy Grandma (Kate Fitzpatrick); and, the Literal Ugly American (Angus Sampson, naturally an Aussie), and then jump into the ocean, and let the toothy God sort ‘em out.
It is the Ugly American (who, in case it wasn’t clear enough, literally yells “I’m an American!” at one point, as if there were any doubt), who smokes where he’s not supposed to, and jams a large, faulty Lithium battery in with his checked bag because he doesn’t care about your stupid rules, okay! Said battery catches fire, blows up the cargo hold and eventually sends the plane, en route to Shanghai, plummeting somewhere into the Pacific. With a band of hearty survivors, some eventually gathered on one of the remaining sections of floating fuselage, some stuck under water in an air bubble, on hand, it’s up to Emotionally Estranged First Officer (EEFO) to keep everyone together, even as a bevy of ravenous sharks endlessly circle and plot their attacks around them.
To be fair, the film’s first 30 minutes is at least slightly better than you might expect — it certainly doesn’t hurt to have Sir Ben Kingsley on hand, even though his character dies in the first act faster than you can say “Fiji Vacation Home” — with a modicum of care put in by Harlin and an army of writers, to give us slightly more than the most basic character beats. Sassy Grandma notes her young seat-mate’s attraction to a comely flight attendant by harshly rating him a “five” on the beauty scale; the technical give-and-take between the flight crew offers a taste of verisimilitude amidst the characters laying out their prickly relationship. But, much like the doomed “Northeastern Airlines” jet itself, the film more or less goes down the longer it goes on.
There isn’t terribly much shark activity either, for all of the film’s marketing materials suggesting a feeding frenzy of Great Whites. Save for a few big, open-jawed moments (again, depressingly realized through weak-sauce CGI), and the occasional corpse suddenly being plucked down from the waters, the sharks make themselves relatively scarce — given the fate of most everyone else in the cast, maybe they were onto something.
