Dangerous Waters falls short on the relatively straightforward basis of simple craft. In a lot of ways, Mark Jackson’s screenplay has a solid foundation for a thriller, including an appreciably stripped-down narrative that doesn’t overcompensate with too many characters or (at least until the climax) contrivances. The problem, then, is that director John Barr doesn’t succeed in giving us anything all that surprising within the confines of those expectations. The “twists” are mostly predictable. The entire second act consists of wheel-spinning, as if the filmmakers were just forcing the plot to go forward until something else could happen. Finally, due to some real-life circumstances that were surely beyond anyone’s control, an action climax that transforms our heroine into an action hero feels tacked-on, too easy, and more than a little lazy.
The elephant in the room here is the death of Ray Liotta, who plays a villainous character in that climax, during production on the film. It becomes quite clear when the real Liotta becomes a body double meant to stand in for him, and after this point, the movie sadly loses its way. It’s hard to blame any particular person for something like this: we will all shuffle off this mortal coil one day. The challenge for Jackson and Barr, though, is reestablishing a sense of danger in the climax. Clearly, a round of rewrites led to the decisions made for the film’s final big action sequence, in which Odeya Rush’s Rose faces down and makes mincemeat of a bunch of big, burly bad guys (and a lady).
We’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, though, so here’s the surrounding context. Rose and her mother Alma (Saffron Burrows) are about to set sail on a boat with mom’s new boyfriend Derek (Eric Dane). He’s the creepy type, constantly commenting on his girlfriend’s daughter’s figure and physical advantages, and Rose doesn’t like spending a single moment alone with him – a fact that seems to be lost on Alma for whatever reason. At first, this seems to be one of those “…from Hell” thrillers, in which Derek is revealed to be a psychopath on top of a major creep, but that isn’t how things play out. Soon, a group of men invade the boat, incapacitate Derek, and murder Alma, leaving Rose to fend for herself.
From here, things are essentially predictable. Once Derek awakes, with no other person on the boat, it seems even more like we’re headed in one direction, unless we were paying any sort of attention to the scene with that group of men. Derek knows them, and his boss (played by Liotta) is waiting on a huge freighter somewhere off in the distance. Little details about Rose, though, establish that she’s more capable than anyone might have thought. She picks up very quickly how to use a semi-automatic machine gun, for instance, so naturally that will be useful.
Dangerous Waters turns out to do precisely what we expect it to do as soon as all the relevant pieces fall into place. There is a sense of comfort in its predictability, just as there is a sense of exasperation. Rush eventually must take up the mantle of action heroine, but there isn’t any danger. For that matter, the actress is only a vaguely convincing physical presence here, though that again might come down to the general letdown in the craft department.
Photo courtesy of Brainstorm Media
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