Different rules apply to movies released in the summer. It’s a time of high-profile, big budget pictures that aren’t generally expected to do much more than entertain and make a lot of money. By and large, summer releases are heavy on action, light on substance. The awards they win are for special effects, editing and sound not screenplay. Deep Blue Sea won’t clean up at the Oscars, but it’s not bad summer fluff.
The threadbare plot revolves around Aquatica, an offshore research facility where sharks are being genetically altered in the hopes of discovering a cure for Alzheimer’s. The high-minded doctor in charge, Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows), is dangerously obsessed with the experiment. As a result of playing Mother Nature with the sharks (she grows their brains to jumbo size and acts surprised when the fish get really smart and mean), she endangers the rest of her staff. There’s hunky shark wrangler Carter (Thomas Jane); nervous engineer Scoggins (Michael Rapaport); marine biologist pixie Janice (Jacqueline McKenzie); gruff researcher Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgard); and there’s something unique: lovable, wise-ass cook Preach (LL Cool J!). It’s the standard disaster movie crew. They’re joined by a corporate representative, Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson, who must need the paycheck). Once the characters are assembled and the clich storm at sea moves in, it’s feedin’ time for makos!
Unfortunately, most of the effects with the sharks are obviously computer generated. Sure they’re big and scary, but they look more like illustrations than actual fish. However, the Aquatica set is impressive. It’s like a satellite at sea, and the scenes of its slow destruction are the best action sequences of the whole movie. There is undeniable tension and surprise plot twists that make for a fairly entertaining cinematic diversion. But don’t go and scrutinize the dialogue, you’ll pull all of your hair out. More appropriately, you’ll laugh. Samuel Jackson’s avalanche speech is a hoot.
Directed by Renny Harlin, who has made his reputation with action films like Die Hard 2 and Cutthroat Island, Deep Blue Sea features some pretty slick underwater film making. Being a high-tech reworking of the unsuspecting-feet-dangling-in-water camera angle first brought to the big screen in Jaws, Deep Blue Sea owes an obvious debt to its disaster movie predecessors. There’s even homage paid to, or maybe a rip-off of, shark prevention used in Jaws II. The intended audience for this movie is most likely too young to remember Jaws II.
Deep Blue Sea is exactly what it looks like. Angry sharks with serious chips on their shoulders exacting revenge, or just plain eating the doomed humans. It’s pretty exciting, though not a very smart summer movie. If you want to sit in air conditioning for an hour and a half, you could do worse than Deep Blue Sea.
+ David Kern
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