Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

THE AISLE SEAT - "DEEP BLUE SEA"

by Mike McGranaghan


For a while, Deep Blue Sea is one of the year's worst films. Then it improves to the point where it's merely stupid. Less than two weeks ago, I saw Lake Placid, a movie about a gigantic crocodile eating a bunch of people. It was dumb, but fun. Now here's a movie about a genetically-altered group of sharks that eat a bunch of people. It's just dumb - the kind of movie where you root for the sharks because characters this boring deserve to be eaten.

Saffron Burrows (an English actress best known for trying to steal Chris O'Donnell away from Minnie Driver in Circle of Friends) plays a researcher who thinks she can use a chemical found in sharks' brains to make an Alzheimer's cure (you will have to excuse me if my scientific grasp of this plot is a little shaky; Stephen Hawking would have a hard time figuring out the specifics of what she's supposed to be doing). Her team operates out of a giant floating fortress, which is called Aquatica and which looks like the sunken set left over from Waterworld. Assisting her are an assortment of "types": the brilliant-but-eccentric scientist (Good Will Hunting's Stellan Skarsgard), the wisecracking cook (LL Cool J), and the potential love interest/generic muscle guy (Thomas Jane in a performance so bland it almost doesn't register). And, oh yeah, there are also a couple of people who might as well have the words "shark food" tattooed on their foreheads.

In the middle of all this comes Samuel L. Jackson. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure who his character was supposed to be. He appears to run the pharmaceutical company that is funding the research, but the movie rushes through the scene which establishes his identity so quickly that I never did figure out his purpose.

I'm getting bored writing about this movie, so let's move on. The sharks' brains are genetically altered, making them very smart. They go nuts and start attacking everybody. If the film provides an explanation for this connection, I missed it. Part of the problem is that the Alzheimer's cure has been tossed in so arbitrarily that it almost is like an afterthought. The filmmakers obviously only cared about the shark attacks, so they glossed right over the one thing that might have made Deep Blue Sea a smarter-than-average thriller. At one point, Burrows risks death by sneaking back into a flooded part of the Aquatica to find her research notes. Now, this could have been a fascinating character trait - the scientist so consumed by the potential benefits of her work that she would risk life and limb for it. Instead, the scene is merely a gratuitous excuse for her to strip down to her underwear before fighting off a computer-generated shark.

Deep Blue Sea is a very bad movie, indeed. It is poorly written and poorly acted (only LL Cool J and Samuel L. Jackson bring any energy to it). With one exception where I honestly did jump, the shark attacks are predictable. Director Renny Harlin (of Cutthroat Island infamy) does nothing to make his film stylish or different. He seems to be trying to outdo Steven Spielberg's Jaws. No such luck. Jaws was scary because you never saw much of the shark; it was the lurking that got you. Harlin, on the other hand, shows you every shark attack in gory detail. The result is nowhere near as effective.

As I said at the top, Deep Blue Sea actually improved somewhat in its second half. The reason for this is simple: the sharks began eating all the characters. By the mid-point of the film, I was so disgusted with the humans that I got a perverse thrill from seeing them ripped apart. It's oddly satisfying to see such dull, vapid, uninteresting characters get chewed to shreds. After tolerating their annoying non-personalities for almost an hour, I felt an unexpected sense of relief. Finally, there was something on screen to hold my interest!

Of course, you can avoid this deranged sense of justice altogether by just skipping the whole stupid movie.

( out of four)


Deep Blue Sea is rated R for language and gory violence. The running time is 1 hour and 41 minutes.

Return to the Archive Page