July
28, 1999 | If you can see only one movie this summer about giant
sharks with genetically re-engineered brains -- make sure it's Deep
Blue Sea.
Of
course, you might well ask yourself: Why on earth would anyone want to genetically re-engineer shark brains in the first place? Dr. Susan
McAlester (Saffron Burrows) performs this miracle of modern science
-- in flagrant violation of about five or six international treaties
-- in the hope of producing a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Unfortunately,
her ends don't entirely justify her means. By tinkering with the gray
cells of three 40-foot makos in her control group, she inadvertently
creates -- well, very smart sharks. Which, she quickly learns, is a very
dumb thing to do. "You've taken God's oldest killing machine,"
a disapproving onlooker notes, "and given it will and desire."
Deep
Blue Sea takes one of Hollywood's oldest horror-movie plots -- bad
things happen when you mess with Mother Nature -- and gives it some fiendishly
clever twists. The opening sequence takes a knowing wink at the prologue
of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's famous fish story, then springs a
genuinely surprising twist. Much later, the movie playfully acknowledges
a genre convention -- there's a certain type of character who's always killed in this type of movie -- then defiantly breaks the rules. Somewhere
in between, there's a much bigger shock, but it wouldn't be fair to
even hint at what happens. Suffice it to say that, during one predictably
unpredictable feeding frenzy, you're likely to exclaim: "I can't
believe they did that!"
Here
and elsewhere in Deep Blue Sea, director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger)
does a nifty job of making the movie move faster than a famished mako.
That isn't quite fast enough to keep you from noticing the thinness
of the characters or the contrivances of the storyline. But once Harlin
finishes the heavy lifting of the long exposition, he infuses this hokey
B-movie nonsense with more than enough urgency and excitement.
This
is not what you might call an actor's picture, but Samuel L. Jackson
is impressively authoritative as millionaire Russell Franklin, the financial
backer of Dr. McAlester's weird science. Worried about bad publicity
-- and, worse, plummeting stock prices -- when an enhanced shark briefly
goes AWOL, Franklin threatens to pull the plug on Dr. McAlester's Acquatica
Research Center, a decommissioned naval submarine base floating off
the Pacific coast. So the good doctor invites her benefactor to Acquatica,
to demonstrate the progress of her research. Naturally, nothing good
comes of this.
With
a little help from a taciturn shark wrangler (Thomas Jane), a know-it-all
engineer (Michael Rapaport), and two eminently disposable fellow researchers
(Stellan Skarsgard, Jacqueline McKenzie), Dr. McAlester puts on quite
a show in her underwater laboratory as she uses brain matter from a
mako to revitalize human tissue. Unfortunately, the mako makes its displeasure
known by sinking its teeth into a not-entirely-innocent bystander. Even
more unfortunately, the research center is badly damaged by a raging
tropical storm and a helicopter mishap. As the human survivors scramble
to reach the surface, the sharks swim into the sinking facility and
stalk their prey through flooded hallways and waterlogged elevator shafts.
And
remember, these are smart sharks. So smart, in fact, that when
the comic-relief cook played by rapper-actor LL Cool J seeks refuge
inside an immense oven, one of the brainy beasts knows enough to turn
on the gas.
With
a world-class team of f/x experts at his disposal, Harlin is able to
keep his killer sharks in plain sight for long stretches of Deep
Blue Sea. Even so, he's admirably restrained when it comes to dwelling
on the dining habits of his big, bad beasts -- there is blood and carnage,
of course, but not nearly as much as you might expect. And he's genuinely
clever when it comes to devising scenes that scream "Boo!"
-- or "Chomp!" -- when you're not quite ready for the
frisson.
It
should be noted, by the way, that at least one special effect has nothing
to do with computer-generated makos. According to the production notes,
Harlin and his producers deliberately cast talented non-stars in most
of the lead roles, to keep the audience from easily guessing what characters
would or would not survive. They claim their chief inspiration for this
stratagem was the original Alien, a movie that subverted genre
conventions by allowing a relative newcomer, Sigourney Weaver, to outlast
her better-known co-stars. So it's quite possible that, when Harlin
contrives to have Saffron Burrows (last seen kicking ass and taking
names in Wing Commander) strip down to her underwear during an
especially tense scene, he's paying homage to a similar unveiling of
Weaver in the 1979 sci-fi classic. That, or he just wanted to showcase
his leading lady in her bra and panties.