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| Directed by Renny Harlan; Starring Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane, Samuel L. Jackson, LL Cool J, Michael Rapaport, Jacqueline McKenzie, and Stellan Skarsgård |
Without a doubt, some of the biggest laughs I’ve had this year were at this film. It is a hilarious action film that made me laugh as much as, if not more than, Drop Dead Gorgeous. The only problem is that all the things I laughed at were not going for laughs. Whether trying for bitter drama or tense suspense, Deep Blue Sea is a laugh riot. The fact that the closing song is almost as funny as “How Do I Deal” from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and “River” from A Civil Action in the genre of hilariously bad movie music should say what types of laughs this film conjures up.
I’ve heard many compare this film to Jaws, but I think that is a little pushing it. Yes it does have some similarities, but they are only skin deep. I actually was more reminded of the awful films Deep Rising and Virus. The characters actually seemed to me to be the same as those in Sphere and Event Horizon (is this a salute to really bad unscary scary movies?).
The film is about the rampage that occurs after two scientists, Susan McAlester (Burrows) and Jim Whitlock (Skarsgård), begin to increase the brain mass of mako sharks as an attempt to make more protein and introduce a cure to Alzheimer’s. They have a big aquatic base that is run by Tom (Rapaport), an engineer, and Carter (Jane), a shark wrangler. Then (dramatic music) “as a side effect the sharks got smarter” and begin to eat everything in their way, whether it be a human or a helicopter. With three of these super-sharks on the loose and the entire first floor of their underwater base flooded, all those in the base must get away from the sharks despite not really having anywhere to go.
The effects are cheesy and the direction from hack director Renny Harlin is his absolute worst (though the shark view camera is pretty funny). I’m quite ashamed of some of the great actors that are in this: Jackson (well one must remember Sphere and 187), Jane (this after Boogie Nights?!), and Skarsgård (and he’s one of my favorite modern day actors). None of the cast does anything that shows any acting talent. The script is so awful that even if the credits say he only produced it, I know that Akiva Goldsman had to have done some of the writing. The film is so laughably bad that I cannot in good faith actually give it a F rating, I had too much fun. If only it had not been the same type of fun as watching Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate.
