Claudio Fäh’s Sharks on a Plane thriller No Way Up has an intriguing premise, but it’s executed haphazardly.
Despite the ludicrous thought of sharks being on a plane, the reality of it is far more sensible than flying fish terrorizing a Boeing jet in the skies. A plane hits a flock of birds and crashes into the ocean in a chaotic set piece (done quite well on a budget, too), and the survivors find themselves entombed in the wreckage on an undersea ravine edge.
With growing pressure on the tattered fuselage and a slow slide to the dark, deep ocean becoming a growing threat, the airlocked survivors are already having a bad day. But sharks have got a bit peckish and have been snacking on the corpses of those who died in the crash. Now, these bloodthirsty terrors of the deep stand between the survivors and possible escape.
It’s fair to say you need to check logic at the gate regarding No Way Up. Over the 90 minutes the film runs for, there are a lot of questionable moments, including a shark ”fact” that runs counter to something we’ve seen in many shark movies. It’s impossible to ignore all of it, but it’s easy to accept some of it and embrace its throwback nature.
There’s an air of the 70s disaster movie to proceedings, and using an actual aircraft cabin submerged in a water tank instead of a greenscreen helps with that. The claustrophobic confines of the cabin are accentuated, giving some believability to the survivors’ plight. While other elements might be as rickety as the downed plane, that decision is a solid one.
But let’s drag it back to before the gang even gets in the air. We’re introduced to our cast of characters at the airport, with some wildly different performance levels. Ava (played by Sophie McIntosh) is our main protagonist, and her arc is most interesting. She starts the film as a silver spoon governor’s daughter who is so coddled that she can’t even go on a trip with her friends without her father sending a bodyguard along (Colm Meaney).
McIntosh gets time to grow into the role as the film progresses, and Meaney is effective as the gruff but sensitive bodyguard. Their performances are fine in this exposition dump of an intro, but they far outstrip the performances of those playing Ava’s boyfriend and friend. Jeremias Amoore plays the boyfriend, and has a very drab and undernourished role. It’s almost like he’s supposed to be the dry, dull counter to Will Attenborough’s over-the-top, obnoxious best bud, but both sides massively overestimate the necessary levels.
Another character that might disappoint viewers is the sharks themselves. While they are a threat, they aren’t really the focus. That’s a good thing to some degree as there’s already a human drama element, a plane crash, and the fear of dropping further into the infinite dark deep ocean. Sharks are the dung icing on the sewage cake.
Still, this is another film that treats sharks as undersea slasher villains, so they might as well just be monsters, because there’s little in the way of actual shark behavior. That is always understandable because real-life depictions of sharks, just like with spiders, would make for a pretty low-stakes watch, but regular sharks doing jump scares and effectively laying ambushes one minute and then being blithely oblivious the next is distracting, to say the least.
No Way Up is a messy, often downright poor disaster movie, but there are elements to it that help it rise above that for a while and come the end, it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time. The concept is cool, and occasionally, there are examples of it being executed well. There’s just not enough of that to plug the leaks found elsewhere.
Score: 5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 5 equates to “Mediocre.” The positives and negatives wind up negating each other, making it a wash.
