Under­wa­ter

Kris­ten Stew­art: fire your agent, out of a canon and into some kind of boil­ing tar pit from which he/​she can nev­er­more mis­man­age the careers of Hollywood’s glim­mer­ing young stars. William Eubank’s Under­wa­ter is the lat­est in a line of slip­shod star vehi­cles (fol­low­ing hot on the heels of mis­fired celeb biopic Seberg and Charlie’s Angels: The Unasked For Reboot) that have served only to crud-up Stewart’s CV and offer hard evi­dence to the stu­dio nabobs that she doesn’t pos­sess the abil­i­ty to draw in audi­ences on name recog­ni­tion alone.

This sub-aquat­ic, sub-par mon­ster caper has a dis­tinct B‑movie ener­gy, but with none of the fun or sub­tle, out-of-the-box cre­ativ­i­ty often allowed in this types of mid-range pic­ture. She is a mem­ber of the crew on a futur­is­tic ocean-floor drilling con­cern which, min­utes after a cheesi­ly por­ten­tous open­ing cred­it mon­tage, suf­fers the adverse affects of what seems to be an earthquake.

The entire sta­tion lays in ruin, and its up to a band of mis-matched sur­vivors to don heavy duty scu­ba gear and take a long, per­ilous wade through the pitch dark­ness and to poten­tial safe­ty. The gang then swift­ly learn, to their detri­ment, that the cause of the ear­li­er dis­rup­tion was not an earth­quake, but some­thing awok­en by humanity’s relent­less scav­enger hunt for the planet’s nat­ur­al resources.

The set up seems sim­ple enough: fol­low a team from point A to point B and beset their path with numer­ous chal­lenges and obsta­cles. Yet the film swift­ly dis­pens­es with inter­nal log­ic, offer­ing no sense of the dis­tance between places or how ardu­ous or swift the jour­ney real­ly is.

On many occa­sions, issues such as lack of air sup­ply or a dam­aged suit are mere­ly cast aside in favour of a murk­i­ly exe­cut­ed CG set piece. Stewart’s char­ac­ter seems to have knowl­edge of every aspect of advanced drilling plat­form life, often defus­ing a sit­u­a­tion by palm­ing the keys on a near­by wall-mount­ed key­board or track pad. This film has been made too many times before and too well for this one to be so lack­lus­tre in so many ways.