DEEP BLUE SEA review

Ahhhhh.... DEEP BLUE SEA, the alleged suck ass film of the summer. The one that is supposed to be sooooo bad, that Moriarty was playing chickenshit and not even going to see it for free.

Why?

Well first off the name Akiva Goldsman is associated with the motion picture which means.... By default that the movie must in fact suck.... Akiva has been associated with some mighty powerful megatonnage of bombs here in recent years. The biggest being that red hot poker in the eye of a movie, BATMAN AND ROBIN. Now Akiva is hated by film geeks above even Joel Schumacher, simply because Joel wasn’t associated with LOST IN SPACE.... Which proved that the cinematic cancer needing to be removed was identified as being Akiva Goldsman. Now I have been feeling for quite some time that while Akiva’s writing isn’t the greatest on the planet, it is also not a plague onto mankind needing Nuremburg style burning treatments. I believe that Akiva has been stricken not with a disease, but with a curse. The curse of being associated with people that didn’t ‘get’ his scripts. Now on DEEP BLUE SEA, Akiva was a producer.... Not a writer, instead he was now the facilitator to either help usher a writer’s script through the film process, or contribute to it’s destruction. But no matter... his name is still a bane to most fans’ existence.

Then we had the next ingredient in the destruction of DEEP BLUE SEA.... Renny Harlin, a director that makes.... what I call almost movies. Movies that could have become a classic cool flick.... BUT something quite hideous is wrong with it. In CLIFFHANGER his villains were terrible, in DIE HARDER.... once again his villains just didn’t gel, in CUTTHROAT ISLAND.. his male lead stars kept leaping ship... first Harrison Ford, then Michael Douglas... Leaving him with Matthew Modine instead. Then the dismissal of Oliver Reed ultimately left... a weak villain. Then there was the Shane Black LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, a movie that is very very entertaining and for me... is probably his most complete film... save that the last act just kinda sucks for me. In all.... Renny Harlin makes entertaining films that just don’t follow all the way through.

And that was the reason why I went into this film with very low expectations. Combine that with some initial horrible test screenings, a fairly bad script draft that was available to read... Well. It just didn’t look like it could be good.

Now then. In the past 2 months the word has slowly but surely been turning around. Tweaking was being done to the movie through the testing process. Additional characters were being slaughtered by sharks. Romantic subplots being scissored here and there. It looked like it was actually moving along much much better... A recent screening up in New York, just a two or three weeks ago wound up with quite a few excited reviews.

So as I left my house today with Father Geek, I felt a slimmer of hope. There might very well be a chance that this movie might at least have decent scenes of a shark eating people. That’s what I wanted. Cool human food deaths.

In the line, people were mostly up for the movie. The trailer from Warner Brothers had done it’s job (unlike THE IRON GIANT trailers) and had grabbed hold of these people and made them excited to see this movie. Specifically that final shot of the trailer. That’s what they were excited about.

We stood out there in the Lobby of one of them damn gaudy Cinemark eyesores for over an hour and a half. Staring at various short short wearing babes, a STUART LITTLE standee, a WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH standee, banners for MYSTERY MEN. Also on tiny television screens trailers played out endlessly... too bad they were trailers for the first half of the summer.... sigh.

Dad was detailing his recent adventure with a man, a legend... an artist friend that we have often had adventures around the globe with. He had just returned from an excursion to the Gulf of Mexico to dig in the ruined blackened ash ridden home of the artist’s father. Digging and shoveling for remains of a family’s lifetime of acquisitions. Father Geek helping to identify the scorched remains for Insurance purposes.

Finally the line jerks forward and we are given admittance to the auditorium where we will be subjected to DEEP BLUE SEA.

I’m not excited in the least to be here. I hear one person say, “It can’t be worse than LAKE PLACID.”

“Hmph,” I say to myself. Ya see, it seems a lot of people are still not ‘getting’ LAKE PLACID, it’s not supposed to be SCARY... It’s a comedy, and if the studio had realized that and not tried to sell the movie as a giant alligator movie, and instead tried to sell the movie as a Smart-Ass Comedy that happened to have a giant Crocodile.... well... That’d be different.

Quint is there, and the group sitting behind us was very loud and... they were reacting to each and every slide on the screen. This is usually a clue that you are going to have to at least turn around 4 times to tell the people sitting behind you to SHUT UP. See... if people behind you are talking about life, rent problems, their boob job, where they hid the treasure... Well, that means they are paying the slides no mind and denotes a reasonable amount of disdain for talking AT the screen, whereas people that do nothing but talk about what is on the screen from instant to instant. That means they have NOTHING ELSE TO THINK and/or TALK ABOUT. Usually I move, but by this time the seats in front of ours were already taken.... sigh.... Well, maybe their inane dialogue will entertain me through this shitty movie.

As you can probably surmise I wasn’t in a very good mood. I wasn’t happy to be where I was for that moment in time. In fact, I was mostly thinking about how I’d like to be in some club on 6 Street with Annette Kellerman listening to some groovy music. I was also thinking about my egg carton I got from DREAMWORKS today (more on that on another story today)

When the lights went down and the trailer for STIR OF ECHOES came up... the first smile of the evening began. Then when the trailer for DETROIT ROCK CITY came on, I again smiled. I can’t wait to see that film. Then a new trailer for THREE KINGS which implies that there are many suitcases of gold, whereas the first trailer made it seem like all the trouble was for one suitcase of the stuff Auric Goldfinger dreams of. Ultimately 3 good trailers, all of which represented movies I would RATHER be seeing.

Also during this time period I noticed that the sound was turned ALL THE WAY up, and as I thought the people behind me were in fact talking non-stop through the trailers, in fact at one point they said, “Why’s it soooo loud?”

And if I had not been enjoying the trailers so much, I would have answered her with, “Because the only sound we are supposed to be hearing is coming from those speakers!”

Then DEEP BLUE SEA began. I prepared myself for the acupuncture this movie was going to give my brain. Thousands of needles, I thought, stabbed into my noggin. That’s what DEEP BLUE SEA would be like. I had a bottle of Advil in my car awaiting the inevitable headache I would be wrought with.

DEEP BLUE SEA

If this were a remake of JAWS it would suck so incredibly because at every single character level it is inferior and has none of that film’s brilliance.

If this were the same genre as JAWS, that being adventure, it would also suck. Structurally it just can not match up.

HOWEVER, this movie is not a remake of JAWS. This is closer to a Crichton movie. Think structurally in terms of Crichton’s work.

You have a talented group of people in a remote research facility and/or isolated area. These are people with singular skills that when working in tandem can overcome that which faces them, which ultimately was created initially by them in the name of science or the advancement of mankind. There is always a series of time limits and problems that will cause the problems to advance. And by the end of it all... Usually those least involved with the creation of the sin to humanity will arise the victor with perhaps one of the scientists that has now learned the error of their ways.

It’s very formulaic, but ya know what? I like that formula. It’s a favorite of mine. It goes back to THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE.... DOC SAVAGE... AGATHA CHRISTIE... You know.

Alright, now that I’ve caught you up to the genre of the film. It’s not horror or adventure... It’s Crichton-y. We’ve seen this in film quite often combined with the ocean/water.

POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE ABYSS being the best of the genre when water is involved. A movie like... oh... Let’s say.... LEVIATHAN or DEEP STAR SIX being at the bottom. And a movie like DEEP RISING and SPHERE existing somewhere in the middle.

Well.... I do believe that DEEP BLUE SEA exists above that middle level, but still significantly below the first two. The movie is fun. Remember that word? Fun. It’s one of the primary reasons to go to a theater.

Are the sharks believable? I don’t know. I have never seen sharks move as fast as these do, but I have also never seen a shark with a brain the size of an engine block. Maybe smart sharks swim faster, though in the human world... Don’t smarter people run slower? Or is it that for my own personal ego, I try to use that as a justification for my own obesity. Hmmm...

While the sharks may be CGI-y... They are the best villains thus far in any Renny Harlin movie. Meanwhile, his good guys/gals are mostly forgettable with the notable exception of LL COOL J and SAMUEL L JACKSON. First, I would have advertised this film as starring Sam Jackson, just as Fox originally advertised ALIEN as starring Tom Skerritt.

Sure it’s not true, but sometimes truth is not the most important component of a movie marketer’s agenda. He/She is supposed to service the film as well as the box office. Now saying that, the trailers for DEEP BLUE SEA did not ‘give the movie away’, but they could have been a tad better than they were.

Then there’s LL COOL J, the true star of the movie. He’s the character that above all others shines.

DEEP BLUE SEA is not the reinvention of the wheel. It’s a straight formula film. However, the formula is played pretty darn well. The set up of this ‘near to the surface’ research facility made it most resemble ANDROMEDA STRAIN, though once again, I want to make it clear that it’s not as good as that film.

BUT.... It is still A LOT OF FUN. It’s got good jump scares. It has plenty of those, “What the hell are you doing you stupid character you,” moments. And at certain points you are feeling an awful lot like a crowd gathered about in a Roman Coliseum rooting for blood to be spilt. AND you get it. When people get eaten in this film it is VERY graphic and violent.

However, none of the deaths have the impact say of Quint’s death in JAWS, but that’s because the characters here don’t have near the development as that film.... Instead, they’re Crichton-style characters that have just enough establishment to show that they know when to flip a switch, how to jump a relay, how to bulldog this or that... Ya know what I mean?

Ultimately, if you want to see Sharks eat people real good. If you want to see POSEIDON ADVENTURE with a shark on the ship chasing you. The film is very much built upon a visceral reaction and not an emotional or thought provoking one.

It’s very much the film it is advertised as being. It is the shark movie of Summer 1999.