Maneater vs. Slug-Fancier: Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas

Alittle Fatal Attraction, a little Gone Girl . . . Hulu’s movie Deep Water sounds like exactly the erotic thriller we deserve. Especially when the girl, this time, is Ana de Armas, who by my calculations is about 17 times as sexy as Rosamund Pike or Glenn Close ever were. Which is not a knock on them. Ana de Armas is so beautiful, she’s practically science fiction (as she was in Blade Runner 2049). The biggest forehead-slapper in No Time to Die (apart from that ending) was hiring Ana de Armas as a Bond Girl and then wasting her on a sexless action scene. Kickboxing women are a dime a dozen, but there is only one Ana de Armas.

So, 100 points for the idea of using her to drive Ben Affleck nuts. They met in the course of filming this movie, became a couple, then broke up before it could be released. (It was originally slated for a theatrical release two years ago.) The voyeuristic thrill of seeing the two of them play a married couple with a potentially lethal difference of opinion adds another layer of trashy, prurient fun to the movie, which makes it 90 percent of the way to being a great thriller. Alas, a thriller is like flying across the ocean: You either get there or you don’t. Pilots get no credit for making it 90 percent of the way to Ireland, and this film sputters out of fuel in the final act. (The script is freely adapted, by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, from a 1950s Patricia Highsmith novel which had a completely different ending, and not one lacking in resolution.)

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Alittle Fatal Attraction, a little Gone Girl . . . Hulu’s movie Deep Water sounds like exactly the erotic thriller we deserve. Especially when the girl, this time, is Ana de Armas, who by my calculations is about 17 times as sexy as Rosamund Pike or Glenn Close ever were. Which is not a knock on them. Ana de Armas is so beautiful, she’s practically science fiction (as she was in Blade Runner 2049). The biggest forehead-slapper in No Time to Die (apart from that ending) was hiring Ana de Armas as a Bond Girl and then wasting her on a sexless action scene. Kickboxing women are a dime a dozen, but there is only one Ana de Armas.

So, 100 points for the idea of using her to drive Ben Affleck nuts. They met in the course of filming this movie, became a couple, then broke up before it could be released. (It was originally slated for a theatrical release two years ago.) The voyeuristic thrill of seeing the two of them play a married couple with a potentially lethal difference of opinion adds another layer of trashy, prurient fun to the movie, which makes it 90 percent of the way to being a great thriller. Alas, a thriller is like flying across the ocean: You either get there or you don’t. Pilots get no credit for making it 90 percent of the way to Ireland, and this film sputters out of fuel in the final act. (The script is freely adapted, by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, from a 1950s Patricia Highsmith novel which had a completely different ending, and not one lacking in resolution.)