“You ready for a weekend that’s gonna change your life?”
DEAD WATER meekly follows in the wake of far more
effective claustrophobic sea thrillers such as Phillip Noyce’s 1989 DEAD CALM and
Rob Grant’s 2019 HARPOON. It sinks itself with a script that treads (dead)
water for two-thirds of its modest running time before introducing Judd (THE
BREAKFAST CLUB) Nelson’s black bearded pirate (no, really), who appears to have
randomly drifted in from a completely different and far more interesting film.
In a clear attempt to kick against type-casting, STARSHIP
TROOPERS Casper Van Dien is implausibly cast as a rich orthopaedic surgeon named
Dr John Livingstone (I presume). Whilst his decorated Marine buddy David ‘Coop’
Cooper (Griff Furst) was on active duty in Afghanistan, the bone doctor
Livingstone was ‘taking care’ of David’s TV reporter wife Viviane (Brianne
Davis). Returning home with full-on raging PTSD, buddy John suggests the couple
come along for a few days away on the open water cruising with him on his new luxury
75ft yacht the ‘Bella Would’ (don’t ask).
Once onboard, Dr Livingstone’s rehabilitation
strategy consists largely of plying Coop with beer, poker and a supremely
inadvisable game of truth or dare. When that fails, he employs an unorthodox
therapeutic technique of shoving a harpoon gun in his mate’s face and demanding
he tells him how many people he killed in combat! As Coop understandably storms
off Van Dien strains every sinew of his chiselled jaw to deliver this
cod-psychology diagnosis with a semi-straight face: “You know you act like a
calm ocean but you’re turbulent underneath!”
When Coop first boards the yacht, he quips: “It’s
not going to be a ‘three hour tour’, is it?” Well the first hour almost feels
like three, with ponderous rather than portentous pacing floundering to the
point where I would have welcomed the introduction of a poorly rendered 3-headed
CGI shark to chow down on this plodding love-triangle.
However, just as I was about to send up a boredom
distress flare, along comes partial salvation in the shape of a fishing vessel
named ‘Usual Suspects’ (no, really) and Judd Nelson as Sam, a black bearded pirate
with a freshly-inflicted scar above his eye (sadly a poor substitute for an
eye-patch).
The unwritten commandment thou shall not spoil
prevents me from navigating you much further through the remaining turbulent waters
of salty and frankly ludicrously laughable plot twists and weakly staged (belated)
violence. However, I honestly wished the film had introduced Judd Nelson’s
pirate a whole lot sooner, or better yet, jumped ship completely over to the
‘Usual Suspects’ vessel.
But, the location photography shot in the U.S Virgin
Islands provided an agreeable distraction when viewed on a grimly wet and windy
Sunday morning. To give Casper Van Dien his due, although he would have been
better served playing the ex-marine role, Casper acquits himself competently
enough given the blandness of the writing and the unsubtle direction which undermines
any implied ambiguity as to his character’s motivations. Apart from his PTSD,
all I learnt about his buddy Coop was that he prefers pistachio ice-cream to
actual food, and Brianne Davis’ ‘Viviane’ is a better shot with a firearm than Dr
Livingstone is with a harpoon gun.
Ultimately, DEAD WATER is dead in the water long
before Yo Ho Ho! pirate Nelson climbs aboard. There’s just about enough story
here to fill up the running length of an episode of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’,
but the preceding 50+ minutes serve as unnecessary ballast that should have
been heaved overboard long before this ship set sail.
(P.S. Note for all scriptwriters, if you’re going to
reference arguably the finest sea-faring suspense film of all-time, please have
the courtesy to at least get one of its main protagonist’s character’s names
correct: it’s ‘Quint’ not ‘Quintin’.)
Paul Worts
**(Out of 5*)
This review was originally published by FrightFest.
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