I am a fan of a good disaster movie. I’m also a fan of a shark movie and have been since I was younger and saw Jaws. When you combine those two, on my birthday weekend, in a movie kick-starting the summer. It should be gold, right?

Well, it doesn’t always turn out that way. That’s the case with Deep Water, a new film about a plane crash into shark infested waters. It comes from director Renny Harlin and a cadre of writers, which might be part of the issue.

The film focuses on a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, China. We meet Ben (Aaron Eckhart), a man too old to be a co-pilot that has been dealt a hard hand in life. That includes a sick son, for whom he’s killing himself taking every assignment on a lower-tier airline.

The main pilot for the flight, Rich (Ben Kinglsey), is nearing the end of a long career. He’s more laid back and trying to take some fun in life. They make for an odd pairing in the cockpit, but they each have a grudging respect.

Then there’s the passengers, including the textbook entitled guy (Angus Sampson) who is going to be everyone’s doom. There’s also Cora (Molly Belle Wright) who is suspicious of planes, her new stepmother, and the family they’re trying to foist on her.

While the flight starts out calm, things don’t stay that way. Soon enough the plan runs into issues and is forced to crash-land in the middle of open water. There, they hit a coral reef, break apart and face a whole new threat from some aggressive sharks.

This should be gold. We get a plane crash. We get a shark survival movie. We get Kingsley and Eckhart in a movie that should be beneath them. But it doesn’t all coalesce into gold, here. The film runs 106 minutes, which is about 20 minutes too long. You feel that length during certain sequences and during an ending that feels like it has two or three false starts.

You also feel the fact there are six credited writers here. There are a lot of ideas and a lot of potential characters, most of which don’t rise above the level of cliché. There are some odd decisions, and some plot points that are never seen through. We also get some odd choices in not resolving the fate of characters onscreen. A lot is left dangling or handled poorly, which saps some energy from the format.

This is a disaster film crossed with a shark tale, so I didn’t have incredibly high expectations. And yet, this film managed to dive below even my meager hopes. It’s not terrible, nor is it the worst film I’ve seen in the genre. But if that feels like damning it with faint praise, that’s the best I can muster.

For those that are shark film completists, this will be a must-watch experience. Otherwise, despite some cool sequences, this doesn’t offer much to be worth a trip to theaters.

Deep Water in now playing nationwide.

Matthew Fox is a graduate of the Radio, Television and Film program at Biola University, and a giant nerd. He spends his free time watching movies, TV, and obsessing about football. He is a member of the FSWA. You can find him @knighthawk7734 on Twitter and as co-host of the Fantasy Football Roundtable Podcast.