Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Cast: Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, LL Cool J, Michael Rapaport, Stellan Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Jacqueline McKenzie, Aida Turturro
Director: Renny Harlin
Screenwriter: Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers & Wayne Powers
Director of photography: Stephen F. Windon
Composer: Trevor Rabin
Price: Rs. 499
For a self confessed fan of creature features, “Deep Blue Sea” is manna from heaven. With a tag line of “bigger, smarter, faster, meaner,” and a story about Mako sharks gone wild, the film is that happy breed of bad film that offers a cheerfully unapologetic fun ride.
Directed by Renny Harlin, the Finnish director who helmed superbly-paced thrillers such as “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger”, “Deep Blue Sea” is yet another nature-strikes-back movie in the tradition of “Jurassic Park”.
Dr. Susan McAlester, whose father had Alzheimer's, is working round the clock at discovering a cure for the disease. Enter goofy science. In a remote secret facility, Aquatica, Dr. McAlester and her team are doing experiments on Mako sharks to harvest their brain cells to reactivate human brain cells. In order to get enough cells, McAlester violates the code of ethics and genetically modifies the sharks to have bigger brains. The end result is the sharks are “bigger, smarter, faster, meaner.”
The suits are nervous about the experiments and want to withdraw funding and shut the facility down. McAlester asks for 48 hours — the weekend to prove the research is going somewhere. The financial backers send Russell Franklin, a corporate executive, to visit the facility.
Of course things go hideously wrong and the smart sharks cunningly start hunting the humans who have been wickedly sticking big, fat needles into brains. Decidedly gory, “Deep Blue Sea” is blessed with super bad dialogue (“Beneath this glassy surface, a world of gliding monsters!!!”) to keep things light and nice.
There are a host of in-jokes including the license plate taken out of the shark's mouth being the same one that was in the mouth of the tiger shark in Steven Spielberg's “Jaws,” the movie that started it all.
The order in which the characters are killed off (the minor characters are invariably killed off first) is subverted resulting in some cool surprises. In fact Preacher, the cook with the coolest lines, even refers to the convention when he says: “Ooh, I'm done! Brothers never make it out of situations like this! Not ever!”
The cast don't really have much to do apart from scream, get wet, run and die in a variety of horrid ways. Samuel L. Jackson has fun as Franklin saying outrageous lines including: “You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder.”
The immensely-talented Stellan Skarsgård plays one of the doctors on Aquatica. Saffron Burrows plays the obsessed McAlister with her British accent underlying her villainy. Though mainly in a wet suit, for some inexplicable reason she strips down to sexy bikini to kill shark — whatever. Thomas Jane plays Carter Blake who is the “fish-keeper” with the troubled past. Rapper LL Cool J is super cool as Preacher with his very own interpretation of the theory of relativity “Grab hold of a hot pan, a second can seem like an hour. Put your hands on a hot woman, an hour can seem like a second.”
The extras include a making-of feature, deleted scenes and a feature on the sharks in the movie. CGI, which we now take for granted, was then taking baby steps and the making-of feature explains how much of the sharks were real, how much was animatronics and where CGI kicked in.
Like last year's “Piranhas,” “Deep Blue Sea” offers laughs and gore in equal measure and would be a great favourite for all with a stomach for it.
