Capsule Review: Dangerous Waters (2023)
Ray Liotta’s untimely death still lingers in my mind even after more than a year since he passed away in 2022. He rose to prominence when he starred alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas in 1990. His decades-long career may have been erratic but he had a few shares of memorable roles such as Unlawful Entry (1992) and Narc (2002).
In 2023, he appeared in three movies including Cocaine Bear, Fool’s Paradise and Dangerous Waters. The latter turned out to be his final film while the movie was still in production last year. If you are here primarily for Ray Liotta, it’s best to set your expectations low. He’s not the main star here since Odeya Rush is the one leading the movie. She plays 19-year-old Rose, who lives with her single mother Alma (Saffron Burrows). Her mother’s new boyfriend Derek (Eric Dane), a former cop-turned-private security consultant invites them to a sailing trip in his yacht to Bermuda.
The trip seems to be going well at first. Derek and Alma look happy together. But there’s something about him that raises Rose’s suspicion, particularly after she discovers an assault rifle below deck. It got worse from there when a small group of pirates hijacked the yacht.
Dangerous Waters looks promising on paper: a mix of vacation-gone-wrong thriller and a survival drama. And Ray Liotta? The fact that he died midway through filming means the production had to make some adjustments. He only shows up in a small role simply named the Captain. A sleazy character, to be exact. Something he has always been good at since he made a career out of it. His usual menacing charm even eclipsed the rest of the cast, and this includes Odeya Rush, who failed to convince me with her hasty character arc.
Don’t get me wrong, she looks the part playing a moody teenager trying to get along with Alma’s new beau, Derek. Her subsequent ordeal from witnessing the pirates’ ambush to learning how to survive while stranded in the middle of the ocean had me initially rooting for her character.
But then comes the third act as if Barr felt the sudden need to take his movie a drastic detour into a different territory. Some movies can pull off a mishmash of multiple genres but it looks awkwardly misplaced in Dangerous Waters. From there, we see Odeya Rush’s Rose morphed into someone else entirely. A young woman who can fight and handle guns like a pro. Sure, the movie did address she likes to fight and has training. She also claimed to “watch a lot of action movies” and her late father was a soldier. Even with the verbal information meant to let us know or foreshadow what she is actually capable of, it’s barely enough to justify her character. If only Barr, who receives a story credit with Mark Jackson writing the screenplay, spent sufficient time establishing her role.
Dangerous Waters also falters in focusing on the two-hander interaction moments between Rose and Derek. There’s a huge sense of blandness in Eric Dane’s performance, making me wonder in an alternate world, swapping him for Ray Liotta playing Alma’s new boyfriend and Dane portraying the Captain instead might produce a better result instead.
