INTO THE DEEP (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Into the Deep, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2025

If killer sharks aren't enough of a threat in a shark movie, is that movie even doing its job properly? That's one of the questions that arise while watching Into the Deep, in which a crew of treasure-hunting divers are momentarily terrorized by great white sharks until the real villains emerge.

Those threats are a crew of what are basically pirates and trauma. At least the trauma has to do with a shark attack from the past, but the pirates feel like a stretch.

Our heroes include Cassidy (Scout Taylor-Compton), who is returning to the place where her father was attacked and killed by a shark when she was a kid, and her husband Gregg (Callum McGowan), who wants to search for treasure on a sunken ship in the area. A few things of note about Cassidy are that she has spent most of her life trying to overcome a fear of the water, that she's still apprehensive about it, and that she's somehow an expert scuba diver, despite the fact that, even as an adult, the movie's continual flashbacks show us that she struggles to stay in the water for any extended period of time. Cassidy's swimming teacher, her oceanographer grandfather Seamus (Richard Dreyfuss), must be a tremendous instructor.

Dreyfuss' presence here is a novelty for director Christian Sesma's movie, since the actor appeared in the granddaddy and still most accomplished example of this subgenre. If you somehow don't know what that film is, it won't be mentioned here, because someone somewhere is probably looking for any vague comparison of this movie to it for marketing purposes. If you don't know it, this movie might be right up your alley, because that suggests you've never seen a shark movie before.

Following a prologue in which a kid Cassidy watches her father be repeatedly bitten and pulled under and maimed by a killer shark (while her apparently un-aging mother, played by AnnaMaria Demara, does nothing but scream), the adult Cassidy is readying for that diving trip in Thailand. The trip is overseen by boat skipper Chason (Tom O'Connell) and joined by a pair of the captain's friends, Itsara (Lorena Sarria) and Daemon (Stuart Townsend). Their first trip into the water results in one of the throwaway characters—which, honestly, could be any of them—being attacked by a great white shark.

Unfortunately for the crew, getting back to shore is made more difficult by the sudden appearance of another boat. This one contains the pirates, led by Jordan (Jon Seda), and they're looking for a shipment of heroin that was dropped in the ocean to be picked up by local smugglers. The pirates take the tourists hostage, and since the villains apparently showed up mostly unprepared to haul the drugs to the surface and completely unprepared for sharks in the water, Cassidy offers to help in exchange for the lives of the crew.

The pirates, of course, are a justification for screenwriters Chad Law and Josh Ridgway to keep these characters stranded in the ocean, surrounded by killer sharks, and going into the water despite that threat. The beasts are presented here by way of a combination of real footage, which looks a bit silly and potentially—not to mention unnecessarily—dangerous if those are prosthetics of human limbs being dangled in front of actual sharks, and visual effects. Because the sharks aren't the main source of menace for the story, the digital fins poking above the water aren't a constant distraction.

Instead, the distraction is how little the sharks matter, compared to the vicious villainy of the pirates. The standoff between them and the divers amounts to a battle of the witless, with Jordan making repeated threats against the only people who can get him what he wants and none of the hostages figuring out any plan to escape until the third act. The whole confrontation feels like a stalemate, because that's the most obvious way Law and Ridgway can keep everyone in place and occasionally get the sharks involved.

Taylor-Compton does make for a tough and determined central figure, and while his casting may be a cheap gimmick, it is nice to see Dreyfuss playing a (legally distinct) variation of one of his most memorable and endearing characters. Into the Deep, though, is unconvincing and sometimes laughable as a thriller. Its biggest unintentional joke arrives with an end-credits public service announcement that's so dissonant from what has come before that it almost has to be seen to be believed.

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