DEEP BLUE SEA (Warner Bros.) Starring: Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport, Stellan Skarsgaard. Screenplay: Duncan Kennedy and Donna Powers & Wayne Powers. Producers: Akiva Goldsman, Tony Ludwig and Alan Riche. Director: Renny Harlin. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 105 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Steven Spielberg has said for years that one of the keys to the success of JAWS was technical failure. The mechanical shark affectionately nicknamed "Bruce" wasn't necessarily supposed to be a shadowy figure menacing the protagonists from the fringes of the frame -- he just didn't work right. Bruce's frequent unannounced work stoppages forced Spielberg to get more creative. The rest is a milestone in cinematic suspense history, further proof that real terror comes not from what we see, but from what we're afraid we're going to see.
It would be easy enough to scoff at DEEP BLUE SEA as a gloss on JAWS that just doesn't "get it," but that wouldn't be entirely fair. JAWS, whether intentionally or made necessary by technical limitations, was a suspense film; DEEP BLUE SEA is an old-fashioned monster movie. The killer predators here are experimental subjects in a floating research facility off the coast of Baja California, enhanced by Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) to promote her research into a shark-based cure for degenerative brain disease. An unfortunate side effect of her research is that the brains of her test sharks are now large enough to permit higher cognitive functions, inspiring such fishy thoughts as "I guess it's about time to destroy the facility and kill all the humans."
Thus begins a person-by-person chomp-fest through a cast that includes (not necessarily in order of consumption) Samuel L. Jackson (as a pharmaceutical company bigwig), Thomas Jane (as a shark diver with a checkered past), LL Cool J (as a religiously devout chef), Michael Rapaport (as the chief engineer) and Stellan Skarsgaard (as a vaguely eccentric research scientist). The genre conventions are all terribly conventional, but director Renny Harlin stages them with methodical effectiveness. There are a few solid scares and one magnificently effective shock, the kind that leaves an audience giggling nervously for several seconds. There's even some cautionary nonsense about scientific hubris, in the fine tradition of FRANKENSTEIN or THE FLY. It's what monster movies are supposed to do, and DEEP BLUE SEA uses its trio of toothy villains to deliver the requisite armrest-gripping.
If only anyone involved with the script had taken a second to go beyond the merely requisite. DEEP BLUE SEA is full of half-completed characters doing generally stupid things. Granted, the monster movie as we know it would not exist without people doing generally stupid things, but it's still frustrating to put up with them saying stupid things at the same time. The film gets even sloppier by positing not merely that the sharks have developed advanced intelligence, but that they have apparently studied physics and engineering, and had access to detailed schematic diagrams of the facility. There's only so far a film can involve you when it treats the viewers as though they're dumb and treats the characters as though they're chum.
DEEP BLUE SEA is, of course, following in some mighty big footsteps in the killer shark milieu, which makes it even more surprising that there are so many echoes of JAWS and its sequels. The opening sequence involves a night attack on some frivolous teenagers; one shark is dispatched with a bite on an electric cable (JAWS 2); another ends up raining down in bite-sized chunks. It's almost as though Harlin and company _want_ the film to be compared to JAWS, as though they think they've one-upped the ultimate shark film. In the press notes, Harlin says of JAWS, "It's 25 years later, and audiences, accustomed to animatronics and computer-generated imagery, need to see more." And perhaps he's right, but that still only makes DEEP BLUE SEA a technically-proficient monster movie. As character-driven suspense, it bites off much more than it can chew.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 fins de siecle: 5.
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