In “The Netflix Bin”, I scour the scores of real gems, awful crap and Nicolas Cage movies on the streaming service, and pick out whatever I want from it. We’ll see how long it takes before I break.
This is a big, wonderful and delicious B-movie, like someone took Jaws, combined it with The Poseidon Adventure, and dumped a thousand pounds of idiocy over everything. Throwing in some hammy Samuel L. Jackson and leaves Deep Blue Sea as one of the dumbest, yet still entertaining, shark films ever made.
A group of scientists work in an underwater lab. Their subject? Mako sharks, notably the fastest swimming breed of that creature. The purpose? To attempt to reactivate human brain cells within them, in an attempt to see if it could cure Alzheimer’s disease.
When have these risky scientific experiments ever gone well in movies? If you guessed “never” for 500, then you might want to consider a career as a Jeopardy! contest. This altering of the sharks’ brains causes them to go psycho, and a rough storm gives them the opportunity to escape, with the crew all stuck in the lab.
The mission? To escape it alive as sharks hunt them down. The people trying not to be eaten? Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), a rough man that does a lot of the dirty work, like corralling the subjects. He also has a mysterious, shifty past that apparently involves criminal activities so serious, he’s blackmailed into not mentioning his concerns about the experiment to others.
There’s Susan McAllister (Saffron Burrows), the brains with an icy demeanor behind this experiment. You spend much of the movie figuring out if she’s meant to be likable or not. Preacher (LL Cool J) and Tom (Michael Rapaport) are a likable cook and assistant, one of the few you want to see live.
Janice (Jacqueline McKenzie) and Jim (Stellan Skarsgard) are random scientists who have no purpose except to increase the body count. Ditto for Brenda (Aida Turturro), who’s in charge of operating the base’s tower.
Then there’s Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson), a corporate big-shot set to supervise all this science. He’s the typical Jackson role you’d see nowadays, loud, brash and slumming it in a picture beneath his talents. His early demise is a YouTube favorite, and an early sign of the kind of film we’re dealing with.
What kind is that? Well, it’s a SyFy movie before those even existed, just with a bigger budget. You know the kind I’m talking about. Hammy acting, blood and guts and more campy moments than you’d find in a national forest. Slow-motion shots of death make up a good shark-bite size of this film.
It’s a relief to see a picture have so much fun with itself. Take an scene mid-way through, when Preacher is being hunted by the shark in the lab’s kitchen. He hides in an oven to escape, but the beast spots him and bangs on the oven’s temperature knob, making too hot for Preacher to stay in there. These small moments keep this movie swimming smoothly.
Deep Blue Sea was directed by Renny Harlin, the man who seems to specialize in making action designed to make your IQ lower. That also means his few attempts during this film to say something about how scientists only care about the bottom line fall flat, mostly because he can’t comprehend how to treat the Susan character.
I guess she could be called a villain, since her work gets the whole mess started. But other people help her out in this experiment too, so are they just as unsympathetic? Heck, Carter (via blackmail) and Preacher are the only ones with any plausible deniability here, so does that mean we’re just watching a majority of unlikable people die?
Pardon the pun, but maybe that’s why so many of the deaths have no teeth. You barely get to know anyone before the slaughter starts, so it’s hard to be connected to any of them.
Anyways, Susan ends up helping Carter and Preacher survive, so does that really make her a villain? Does that mean she had to die? You won’t find these answers in a movie not willing to ask the questions.
But really, that’s not the purpose of Deep Blue Sea. The reason why it exists is to pound you into submission with dumb entertainment, the kind that deserves to be riffed at after a few beers. I’d eat that opportunity up like a shark.
Advertisements Share this:
