Deep Blue Sea
Warner Bros., 1999
Directed by Renny Harlin

$$$

Just when you thought you were too cynical to go back in the water, along swims Deep Blue Sea, a film that gives the ocean of bad movies a good name.

In today's been there, done that world, movies aren't allowed to be stupid unless they know they're stupid. So we jaded viewers are left with a spate of self-referential movies that are either too ironic for their own good (Scream) or not ironic enough (think Godzilla). But then there's Deep Blue Sea, a movie that's knows it's dumb, but doesn't want to let you know it knows.

Like all good B-movies, it pretends to be smart -- pretends to be making a statement about something, a statement that only serves as an excuse for its talented but mostly no-name cast to become fish food. In this case, the topic du jour is animal testing. The plot revolves around a deep sea underwater laboratory where scientists are doing experiments on sharks. To aid their studies, the researchers have used gene therapy to increase the sharks' brain mass. As a side-effect, one scientist nonchalantly explains, the sharks got smarter. Of course the newly intelligent sharks don't like being poked and prodded and when a bad weather-related disaster starts to flood the facility, they get their chance to bite back.

It's the same Man Fools With Nature and Pays the Price plot we've seen before, but this time, the evil-scientists' motives aren't purely evil. The aim of their experiments is to find a cure for Alzheimers. If it's a choice between three nasty sea predators suffering, or the continued suffering of the families of Alzheimer's patients, you have a tough time blaming the scientists for trying to play God, even if you don't admire their methods. The whole scenario makes the sharks' revenge more interesting, too.

Once the ethical debate is dispensed with and the characters start becoming shark snacks, Deep Blue Sea evolves into an amalgam of two '70s classics: Jaws and The Poseidon Adventure, with a helping of Alien thrown in. As the survivors scramble through the waterlogged lab, trying to avoid getting eaten, the cast's relative anonymity becomes an asset -- with a lack of big name stars (except for Samuel L. Jackson), it's harder to predict who's going to become a meal.

The sharks themselves are the real stars. Fast and furious, they're like velociraptors with fins and the animatronic and CGI effects that bring them to life, look pretty impressive.

Director Renny Harlin also manages to keep us guessing. Handing in his best work since Cliffhanger and the underrated Die Hard 2, Harlin gives us a movie that defies expectations. It takes us down a familiar road, but throws in some surprising turns. Many of the situations don't turn out the way we think they will and at times Harlin seems to be winking at us, as if to say, You didn't see that coming, did you? The movie may not be one-step ahead of its audience, but it's at least a half-step ahead, and that's more than you can say for a lot of recent blockbusters.

(c) Copyright 1999