Viking Night: Deep Blue Sea
By Bruce Hall
July 11, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And if you’re veteran director Renny Harlin, you really needed to close out the 1990s on a high note. The decade was an up and down one for Harlin, beginning with The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, possibly peaking with the (overrated) Die Hard 2 before spiraling into darkness with the hated Cutthroat Island. That’s a mixed bag if there ever was one. So, does Deep Blue Sea represent a recovery, or the soggy cherry atop someone else’s half eaten sundae?
Meh...a little of both.
Also, full disclosure - this was my first viewing ever of Deep Blue Sea, so although I’m familiar with the movie, I am writing this from the perspective of a fresh experience. Remember that as you read; this is basically Rip Van Winkle’s review of a film you’d think he would have seen before he went under.
The first thing you have to have in a film like this is an opening scene that sets the tone of the story, and gives the audience a delicious taste (pun) of the upcoming horror. Obviously, there’s no topping the opening of Jaws. So what would you do if you were Harlin, and had recently made a pretty decent action film about Sylvester Stallone hanging off the side of a mountain while John Lithgow circled in a helicopter, snarling like a badger? Well, the answer to that should be the answer to more problems, in my opinion.
Tom Jane with a harpoon gun.
While you let that bit of awesomeness sink in, let me back up a bit. Put some stupid teenagers on a boat in the middle of nowhere, and let them stand around shushing each other while a something massive beats on the bottom of their boat. Just as your mouth begins to shout “Why the fuck are you just STANDING there?!?”, the boat is in pieces, and kids are thrashing around in the water. And just as your mind is preparing itself to see chunks of attractive, young white meat floating in the water...something different happens.
Hmmm. Those kids were idiots, but aren’t they always? More important, I definitely wasn’t expecting The Punisher to pull up in a speedboat and save the day. But then...cut to a newspaper headline telling us that the shark in question had escaped from an experimental lab. This, just as Saffron Burrows (looking like she could really use a sandwich) confronts an unhappy looking Sam Jackson with the curious understatement (and the first meaningful spoken words in the film): “Okay, we’ve had some problems at the facility.”
Wait...is this a shark movie that’s also...subversively self-aware? Interesting.
Burrows delivered that line with just a dusting of irony, and when she said it my mind flew back to The World is not Enough. You know, the third consecutive Bond film to squander the fact that Pierce Brosnan was literally born for the role. In it, Denise Richards played Dr. Christmas Jones, the world’s most incompetently sexy nuclear physicist (and winner of Viking Night’s prestigious Most Awkward Bond Girl award). It’s not Richards’ fault she was miscast, but it was impossible to take her seriously as a physicist when her primary function was clearly an answer to the question:
“What if James Bond got to bang a Lara Croft cosplayer?”
Saffron Burrows has it...a little better. She’s not there to be a sex object (thankfully), but her elegant British accent is the only thing keeping her from sounding entirely out of her element as a scientist. Maybe that’s the point. She’s playing Dr. Susan McAlester, who is apparently the world’s leading Alzheimer’s researcher - or something. Jackson is playing eccentric billionaire Russell Franklin, who is financing her research. McAlester explains that it all has something to do with shark brains, something something science her father died - so you know she’s serious about this.
The point is, a company called Chimera Pharmaceuticals (get it? Google it, if you don’t) is supposed to be benevolently performing genetic experiments on sharks in an effort to cure dementia. That all sounds good, but the president of Chimera is the same dude who was running Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop. Actor Ronnie Cox has no lines - his mere presence is shorthand for “this company screws people.”
Additionally, when Franklin accompanies McAlester to the research facility, he seems bizarrely unaware of what goes on there - especially since the previous scene was all about how much money he’s spending on all this. This isn’t just an excuse for Burrows to spout painfully expositional dialogue (and she does; everyone does). It’s an actual plot point that he really seems to not have any idea what’s going on at the billion dollar research facility whose work underpins the entire company’s financial portfolio.
Worst of all, the facility is called “Aquatica,” which sounds like a bad '90s synth-pop band. Also, friggin Michael Rappaport is in charge of the shark pens.
Okay, okay, you didn’t need me to tell you that this is a disaster in the making, where all the characters are stupid and everything around them goes predictably wrong. Of course the facility is conveniently short staffed. Of course a storm happens. Of course the therapy has the unintended side effect of turning the sharks from killing machines to hyper-intelligent, vindictive killing machines. And of course people spend a lot of time standing around staring at something horrific instead of immediately fleeing. I wasn’t just being vulgar earlier - this movie will make your brain scream “Why the fuck are you just standing there!!” over a half dozen times before it's over. The science, physics, the drama - very little about Deep Blue Sea is what you’d call “credible.”
But the one thing you must have in a movie like this is a strong first act, and that’s exactly what happens here. I don’t mean to say that it’s groundbreaking, or even particularly satisfying, from a narrative standpoint. But if you happen to watch Deep Blue Sea after reading this, pause after 20 minutes and ask yourself the following: What are the stakes? What’s the tone of the story? Who are all these people? What motivates them? What kind of universe do they live in? What are the rules? You will find that you HAVE answers. Not DEEP ones, but answers nonetheless. Everything that happens after that is completely bananas, but you can’t say you haven’t been warned about what’s coming.
It should also be noted that cinematographer Stephen Windon is best known for his work on about half the Fast & Furious films, so take whatever that means to you worth a grain of salt. What it means to me is that in addition to being a technically well constructed film, Deep Blue Sea is also a fine LOOKING movie. It may seem hard to go wrong with the ocean as your backdrop, but it also takes a lot of imagination to create a distinctive world out of that, and he succeeds quite well here. It’s to the film’s credit, because without some relatively solid (if not entirely believable) world building, it’s harder to accept what happens later in the film.
Very hard.
I do realize that the premise of this movie involves regular, every day Mako sharks being turned into genetic superbeasts with a deep and abiding hatred of humans. But for some reason, in this movie the sharks audibly roar, and also rumble like the USS Enterprise when they pass by the camera underwater. That may not sound like a big deal, but it becomes as hilariously distracting as the way the characters constantly freeze up when attacked, instead of running away. Hey, we just saw a shark swim backward for the first time in 300 million years! And what does the head scientist (Stellan Skarsgard) have to say about this as his team barks in amazement?
“Let’s stay focused, people!”
Stay focused? On what? Tom Jane’s abs? What if the sharks started talking, or playing air guitar? Would that be interesting enough to draw focus? Deep Blue Sea is filled with characters who consistently do the complete opposite of what a normal human would do, making it much harder to sympathize with their horrible, bloody deaths. Of course, Skarsgard is also the guy who foreshadows doom by contemptuously comparing their work to God during a critical moment in the story. So, this is the kind of science movie where the scientists are on the side of the screenwriters, and NOT of science. It just feels at many points in the story like there might have been a less stupid way to reveal certain things, while still serving the plot.
I choose to make the assumption that this is a well made movie that simply chose to embrace a terrible script, while giving the actors enough space to breathe what life they could into it. Tom Jane’s “shark wrangler” is by far the coolest character in the movie, and I’ll be damned if Jane doesn’t manage to inject just a dash of pathos into the guy. L.L. Cool J famously appears in a stereotypical role that may have come right out of a Michael Bay film, but he provides welcome comic relief from story events that, up to the point he appears, are already funny, but for all the wrong reasons.
I can’t tell if Deep Blue Sea is TRYING to take the piss out of killer shark movies, or if this is just a happy coincidence. Jaws was originally supposed to be more like Deep Blue Sea and less like the classic it is - a malfunctioning robot shark ended up forcing a change in tone. The reality behind Deep Blue Sea is probably closer to “good people make bad film as best they can,” but the end result is undeniably fun to watch. Even if it’s not a great film, or even a particularly good horror picture, you’ll get a lot of laughs out of it. Watch it because you love to laugh. Watch it because you enjoy watching stupid people die due to their own bad decisions.
At best, this is a “so bad it’s good” kind of film, that’s best watched drunk with friends in situations like a Super Bowl loss, a national tragedy, or whenever group bonding is appropriate. And best of all, Deep Blue Sea contains the one thing - the only thing - that might have made Jaws, and every other movie ever made, just a little bit better:
Tom Jane. With a harpoon gun.