Somebody stop Renny Harlin before he strikes again!
You might have thought the studios would have kept Harlin in dry dock after his 1995 pirate epic Cutthroat Island was one of the biggest flops of all time. But, no, they've let him set sail again, this time with his latest waterlogged extravaganza, Deep Blue Sea, a big dumb movie full of big smart fish.
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Ostensibly a cautionary tale about the dangers of messing with nature's design, Deep Blue Sea takes place on a remote man-made island far off the coast of Baja, California.
There, scientists working for the Aquatica Research Lab have genetically engineered three gigantic, 45-foot-long Mako sharks into swimming brain hormone factories, hoping to generate a cure for Alzheimer's disease.
The masterminds are Stellan Skarsgard as Dr. Jim Whitlock and Saffron Burrows as Susan McAlester. Dr. Whitlock, we're told, is the most brilliant man ever. Nothing he does demonstrates that, however. It seems someone has forgotten to give the genius much of a role. How appropriate for a film with degenerative brain disease as its central premise.
Susan McAlester, on the other hand, is an ambitious and beautiful piece of work. Her passive-aggressive nature and snotty British accent tell you right away that she's not one of the good guys and, sure enough, she's not. Driven by memories of her own father's Alzheimer's suffering, McAlester seems to have left her own common sense on the mainland. She's doing it all for daddy.
It turns out that McAlester has illegally collaborated with Whitlock by giving the sharks some sort of gene therapy. It not only made them bigger; it made them the Einsteins of the piscine world.
Everything is going swimmingly at first. Through one of those nonsensical scenes of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, we're made to understand that the cure is at hand: Alzheimer's will soon be ancient history. But before the cure can be realized, a tropical storm suddenly descends on the sea base. The sharks turn evil and take on their masters.
As an allegory of man's hubris in trying to bend the laws of nature, it's not such a bad premise. Unfortunately, Deep Blue Sea doesn't take its own advice. It breaks the laws of nature at every turn.
Even for an action thriller, the movie is filled with preposterous impossibilities. A rampaging shark shatters a window the size of a movie screen 280 feet below the ocean surface, and our heroes are able to run away from the rushing torrent. A rescue helicopter crashes and the ensuing explosion makes Hiroshima look tame. The film's hunky hero, Carter Blake (played by Thomas Jane), pries open gigantic steel doors using his bare fingers and rides gigantic sharks for kicks. Once all hell breaks loose -- which happens quickly -- the cast spends the first half of the movie running away from water. Lots of squirting and flooding going on. They spend the second half of the movie running away from the sharks, who, despite the fact they don't like the taste of human meat (we're told earlier in the movie), have suddenly turned into creatures that will risk any menace for just a morsel of homo sapien flesh.
The scene in which the sexy but evil McAlester doffs her wetsuit to use as electrical insulation while zapping a big shark with a power cable is perhaps the goofiest action plot device ever to get a woman out of her clothes. Take away that, the explosions, the big teeth, and there's simply nothing to this movie. Even Samuel L. Jackson can't save it. His character, a rich financier, speaks lines so wooden they might have been written by George Washington's false teeth.
The only really pleasant surprise of the film is LL Cool J in a supporting role as Preacher, the lab's cook. Preacher is the film's conscience, a homie with street smarts -- in contrast to the egghead honkies who think it's cute to breed supercharged sharks.
Animatronic sharks were used for many of the scenes, particularly those involving actors, and they're terrific. In other parts of the film, however, computer-generated sharks are used. The CGI sharks simply don't cut it. They move, quite simply, like cartoon characters.
It is said that during the shooting of Jaws, Steven Spielberg was forced to rewrite much of the movie because the mechanical shark built for that film didn't work very well. As a result, the shark in Jaws is less of a physical reality than a psychological one, and it's the possibility of the shark that haunts Jaws. Unfortunately, the sharks in this movie fail to achieve that level of menace.
In short, Deep Blue Sea stinks like a barge full of week-old bait, an Alien rip-off with no substance and little form.
