I saw Deep Blue Sea at the cinema when it first came out, but it dawned on me recently as I was preparing for this review that I couldn't actually remember much more than the basics of the plot - something that's quite unusual for me as I usually have quite impressive recall of all the useless details of the various B- and Z-grade movies i watch. This isn't due to the film being particularly bad or unmemorable or anything like that, but because apparently most of my memories of the film had been overwritten by a clear recollection of that one scene from the movie that everyone knows. You know the one: the one where Samuel L Jackson's character makes that big inspiring speech about how they all have to work together if they're going to survive, and then... well, you know what happens next. The only other thing I remembered clearly was that LL Cool J was also in the film, and that I hadn't been too impressed with him.
Dr Susan McAlester is trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's Disease. A noble aim, certainly, but in her zeal to find a cure she has gone down a dangerous path. Theorizing that a protein found in the brains of sharks could hold to the key to reversing the neural degeneration seen in dementia patients, she genetically engineers three Mako sharks to have larger brains - thus increasing their intelligence and overall size into the bargain. When the man funding the doctor's experiments visits their off-shore facility at the same time as a hurricane passes by, the sharks pick that time to put an escape plan into action - eating any humans they happen across along the way. Dr McAlester and the other survivors have to not only escape the facility before it collapses completely, but avoid and stop the sharks as well...
Near the beginning of Deep Blue Sea, there's a tiger shark with a Louisiana license plate stuck in its teeth - a little nod to Jaws and its tiger shark that had also paid a visit to that state. But other than that reference and the fact that both movies contain sharks, these two movies actually have little in common. In my Jaws review I mentioned how the film showed us that nature was pretty damn deadly and terrifying on its own and didn't need any outside or artificial help in that area. Deep Blue Sea, however, goes in the opposite direction and has the sharks enhanced through the power of Science! to be considerably larger, smarter and meaner than the average shark. So these sharks apparently hold grudges, seem to have some impeccable comic timing (as Samuel L Jackson's character discovers), and are even able to do things that are otherwise impossible for sharks, like swim backwards (and at least the first two things can be explained by their larger brains). And even after all of that, the sharks aren't made all that much scarier.
Part of the reason for that is that the sharks aren't the only threat to the humans - they've also got to contend with their off-shore laboratory collapsing around them. Super-intelligent sharks may indeed be quite terrifying if you have the time to stop and think about them, but when they have to share the threat with an exploding off-shore facility it almost feels like they're taking a backseat to the danger of a collapsing infrastructure. The sharks only really pop up whenever it's time for the survivors to be whittled down some more; to me at least, the rest of the film felt rather like a cut-down version of The Poseidon Adventure.
With that in mind, therefore, Deep Blue Sea's biggest problem is that it's very formulaic. It's got all the key points of your generic action-disaster movie (which isn't all that surprising when you realise that director Renny Harlin - who we've seen on this blog before with the movies A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: the Dream Master and Devil's Pass - also directed Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger) and many of the character tropes found in your average horror film. You've got the female doctor whose hubris comes back to bite everyone (literally) in the ass; the ex-con hero who you just know will be the one to save the day (played by Thomas Jane, who went on to play the Punisher in at least one movie, which just makes it even more certain that he's going to survive); the twitchy engineer; the blonde woman in a relationship with someone who dies early on; and LL Cool J as the comic relief. Apparently, the role LL Cool J plays was originally meant to go to Samuel L Jackson, but his management didn't like the idea of him playing a chef, and so he had a new role written for him. The irony is that the chef character, despite being comic relief (he's a chef, he's a Christian who talks regularly to God, and he has a foul-mouthed parrot) turns out to be the film's other big hero, while the new character is now mainly known in YouTube lists of "Top 10 Surprising Deaths in Movies".
Deep Blue Sea isn't a bad film, but it's not brilliant either. In trying to be both a sci-fi horror movie and a disaster-action movie it ends up spreading itself too thin, and the latter themes come across much stronger than the former. Which means if you're watching the film for the sharks, you're going to end up being disappointed.
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