DEEP BLUE SEA
At any rate, it's the best shark movie in 21 years
Renny Harlin is a director that it's pretty hip to dislike, it seems - I'm not entirely sure why, but maybe it's just fun to jump on a guy who's had two commercial flops in a row. But I like his work just fine - hell, I loved those last two flops of his.
Saffron Burrows (lookin' great on that poster, although a shade thin when we see her in her undies) stars as an Alzheimer's researcher who invites her corporate sponsor (Samuel L. Jackson) to her floating lab to reassure him that yes, they're going somewhere with this. What she's doing is raising sharks with mega-sized forebrains, so that she can suck out some fluid and use it to regenerate human brain cells. Just how close this is to any real ideas on Alzheimer's treatments, I don't know, and I don't really care. Anyway...super-smart sharks, isolated lab...you figure it out. Add also a nasty storm (natch) and a helicopter crash, and you may as well give the damn things legs.
This isn't a very suspenseful movie, but it manages to have a few good "shark jumps out of the water" shocks anyway. The best of which is used to hilarious effect, for two reasons. One, it violates both the old "don't kill the star" rule, and the new "kill the star, but only in the first fifteen minutes" rule. Two, it happens right in the middle of a notably protracted example of one of the most tiresome clichés of disaster movies. You'll know it when you see it. It's a real hoot. I don't think I've been this surprised by a single moment in a film since...shit, I don't know.
Dang. I think I just gave it away. Ah, well.
Yeah, no less than three people are ripped in half right in front of the camera in this movie, and you'll probably have fully expected at least two of them to live. There's not much gore other than those scenes, but aren't those enough? Man, ripped in half and then swallowed piecemeal - not always by the same shark. Sometimes divided like a wishbone between two.
The cast is nothing noteworthy - nobody really comes across as very good, except maybe Jackson. L.L. Cool J is here, acting as if (again) trying to tell us he's the next Will Smith (haven't we had enough of the Will Smith we already have?). You know what I mean - a black guy who acts like a white guy doing a parody of a jive-talkin' black guy. Nobody else much registers at all, except Burrows, who made me think "No, take it ALL off!"
The effects are mostly pretty good, though nothing all that special. The sharks are almost all CGI, and often look it, though not too distractingly so. I just don't understand that "ceiling of fire" in the elevator shaft. What the hell was going on with that? The music by Trevor Rabin sucked too, screaming out "YOU'RE WATCHING AN ADVENTURE MOVIE!" at every possible opportunity.
But still, it's a fun, summer-afternoon distraction, certainly worth the five bucks if you like seeing people get ripped in half, and are tired of a 21-year drought of good shark movies (those last two Jaws flicks don't count as good, duh). It's better than we probably would have gotten had that book Meg been filmed instead, at any rate.
I'm pretty sure I spotted Harlin himself, disembarking from the lab station with his arm around some chick. And of course, the requisite Finland reference - a bottle of Finlandia Vodka (yecch!). Couldn't he just have put Sentenced or Amorphis on the soundtrack?