Deep Water

Deep Water is the much feted return of the starry erotic psychological thriller ™ to our screens and from director Adrian Lyne as well, the man who arguably kicked off the genre with 1987's Fatal Attraction. Add in a real life couple playing the couple onscreen and a streaming platform that allows films to be shown without the snips required to ensure a film gets a particular age certificate. This should have been a big ol' slice of filthy fun but the reality is about as horny as guinness fart on a packed bus.

If you're anyway online you'll be intimately acquainted with the numerous Sad Affleck memes floating around these past few years. You know them, Ben on a beach staring pensively into the uisce or having a sneaky smoke, looking like the weight of the world is weighing down on those broad shoulders of his. Deep Water is that meme stretched out to nearly 2 hours and yes, it's about as entertaining as that sounds. Ok, there's fun to be had here but it's the laughing at and not with kind. Ana de Armas does her sultry best as his onscreen wife but oh no, it just ain't happening. When a film's most memorable scene is a reminder that snails have to be starved before they're eaten..... yeah that's not a good sign. And we haven't even mentioned that ending yet. That bizarre, nonsensical final act.

Vic and Melinda Allen are a couple existing in a small Louisiana town. They've long fallen out of love but he allows her to take lovers to ensure that she won't leave him. She flaunts her infidelities in his face and he just watches impassively despite their friends and co-workers knowing exactly what's happening. One night at a party he jokes to her current lover how he took care of a former lover and it sets off a chain of events that well..... you'll have to watch this bland bullshit and find out.

There could have been fun had here. Patricia Highsmith's deliciously dark 1957 novel is the source material and despite being 65 years old it took way more risks with it's story than you'll experience here. If the film had the balls to stay true to the novel you'd have an ending that would make what came before more forgivable but all we get here is a ridiculous bicycle chase following a character appearance that will make you scratch your head intensely trying to figure out the hows and whys of how they ended up where they ended up. It's a laughably bad climactic moment but then soon after the film really strives for a profundity that just isn't earned at all. You'll get it, but you won't like it because the story has chickened out

.The thriller aspect of Deep Water fails miserably so how about the erotic part? Heh. We know the story calls for a distance between Vic and Melinda but there's no bit of spark here at all, no sense of why they'd ever have gotten together. Jesus even Gigli, the notorious Affleck/Jennifer Lopez turkey (gobble gobble!) from 2003 did better on that front, meaning the much feted sex scenes between them just feel limp and kinda pathetic. Surprisingly tame too considering they're directed by the man behind 9 & 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. They just speak to the fact that modern day film audiences seem to have no appetite for cinematic boom boom. It's a pity and it means that the starry erotic psychological thriller ™ will probably be staying put in the late 80's/ early 90's once again.

Deep Water is streaming online now. You'll be glad you didn't pay to see it in a cinema.