No Way Up concerns a plane that crash-lands in the Pacific Ocean, where it is set upon by sharks presumably attracted to its slippery tail fin.

The trailer for this 2024 survival thriller garnered it the nickname Sharks on a Plane, a misleading moniker that implies it contains comedic or fun elements. Chance would be a fine fin. To say the shark flick squanders its comic potential is a great white understatement, its script too bland to even offer a discernible protagonist.

Law school dropout Ava (Sophie McIntosh) is at least given sketches of backstory, namely that her mother drowned and her father is the Governor of California. This seems the perfect setup for a hilarious shark-based assassination attempt – Snakes on a Plane meets Red Eye – but her parentage proves irrelevant, and is only there as lazy shorthand for “this is someone you should care about.”

The film is cliché-ridden and contrived to the point that every character happens to have conveniently relevant experience to this extremely unlikely situation, including the 10-year-old girl (Grace Nettle). There are at least some impressive visuals so you can see where the budget went – spoiler alert: not on the actors, one of whom appears to have been cast because his name is Manuel Pacific.

This Amazon Prime fodder is a waste of a catchy hook, whose only memorable moment is when someone asks: “What’s a shark doing on a plane?” – a salient question were the plane literally anywhere other than in the sea. As a line it sums up the movie perfectly: the setup to a joke with no punchline.