Amazon.com video review:
With a voracious trio of mako sharks wreaking havoc, Deep Blue
Sea
dares to up the ante on Jaws, but director Renny Harlin trades the
nuanced suspense of Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster for the trickery of the
digital age. In other words, why build genuine terror when you can show
ill-fated humans getting torn into bloody chunks? The aforementioned makos
have been lab rats in an effort to harvest a miracle cure for Alzheimer's
disease from the brains of sharks, but the research has an unfortunate
side effect: the sharks get smarter, and they're determined to break out of
Aquatica, the deep-sea complex where they've been penned.
Model-actress Saffron Burrows plays the researcher; Thomas Jane pulls
double-duty as shark expert and action hunk; Samuel L. Jackson's the
corporate sponsor who chooses the worst time for an Aquatica tour;
and rapper LL Cool J is nicely cast as Aquatica's cook and comic
relief.
Michael Rapaport, Jacqueline McKenzie, and Stellan Skarsgård round out the
cast, most of whom are turned into shark food as the makos turn Aquatica
into a floating junkyard. Harlin takes devilish pleasure in providing
sudden, unexpected shocks--no small feat in such a derivative thriller--and
as a series of action set-pieces, Deep Blue Sea never
disappoints. It's inevitable that Burrows should end up in her underwear
like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, but even then the movie offers a
credible reason for the strip-down; that Deep Blue Sea can be
simultaneously ridiculous and sensible is just another one of its shlocky
charms. --Jeff Shannon
