Last week I watched a film I hadn’t seen in ages!
Deep Blue Sea (1999)
I love a good shark movie! Unfortunately “good” shark movies can be hard to come by amongst all the B-Movie awfulness that’s out there. As cheesy as this is in places, it’s definitely one of the better ones in my opinion.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s an action/adventure/sci-fi/thriller directed by Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) starring Thomas Jane (The Mist), Saffron Burrows (Troy), Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction), LL Cool J (Halloween: H20) and Stellan Skarsgård (Good Will Hunting) among others.
This is what it’s about:
On an isolated underwater facility, a team is conducting research, harvesting the brain tissue of DNA-altered sharks as a possible cure for Alzheimer's disease. When the facility's backers send a corporate executive (Jackson) to investigate the experiments, a routine procedure goes awry and a shark starts attacking the researchers. Now, with intelligent sharks (as a result of the DNA altering) stalking the survivors and attempting to flood the facility, the team must figure out a way to stop them from escaping to the open ocean and breeding.
Reading that back, I can see how anyone who hasn’t seen this film might laugh and give it a miss. However, as silly as it sounds it’s actually highly entertaining.
I think this is the first shark film I ever saw with CGI sharks - something that hadn’t been or couldn’t be done previously (let’s not talk about Jaws 3D)…
Obviously CGI plays a huge part in most films nowadays and although a little ropy in places, it works quite well in this movie. Luckily there are practical effects too so some scenes are more believable than others.
The acting isn’t some of the best you’ll see which is surprising with the likes of Samuel L. Jackson and Stellan Skarsgård in the the cast, but the film makes up for it in a lot of other ways.
It has a decent (if not far fetched) story, some great action sequences, a couple of fun characters, a great score that really puts the “scary” in the scary scenes, and LL Cool J. What more could you want?
To sum it up, if I was writing a one line review for the cover of the DVD, I’d probably go with “The Poseidon Adventure with sharks!”
As it happens there are two sequels to this film. Both were released straight to video and completely escaped my notice until recently. I haven’t seen either but I’m always suspicious when a sequel to a big movie doesn’t get much publicity...
This is a fun film and definitely worth a watch if you’ve somehow missed it.
Seen it? Let me know.
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