‘What you’ve done is taken God’s oldest killing machine and given it will and desire…’
So-bad-it’s-good. Kitsch. Camp. These are hard things to quantify. It’s a fine line between so-bad-it’s-good and just plain bad. What makes The Meg a tedious slog when Deep Blue Sea is so irresistible? I mean, The Meg doesn’t have LL Cool J literally blowing up a shark, so there’s that…
Of all the plot descriptions I have written over the years, this promises to be the most preposterous. A group of incredibly attractive and athletic scientists are trying to find the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, so, naturally, their first move is to create some kind of super shark that is capable of concocting complex Machiavellian schemes. Aboard this floating research facility we have Samuel L. Jackson, the aforementioned Cool J, Michael Rapaport, Saffron Burrows, Thomas Jane and Stellan Skarsgård. A genuinely great cast.
Unfortunately, none of their characters are gifted with anything as vulgar as a personality or any kind of character motivation, but that’s not what this film is about. We know what it’s about. It’s about Samuel L. Jackson being eaten by a shark in the middle of an inspirational speech. It’s about LL Cool J declaring ‘take me back to the ghetto’ as the credits begin to roll. It’s about Saffron Burrows taking all of her clothes off in the middle of a shark attack to reveal that she is wearing matching sexy underwear to work. None of this beautiful nonsense makes sense, but then it doesn’t need to. That’s not what we’re here for.
Having said that, there is no denying that Deep Blue Sea is a bad film. The editing is chaotic, the plot is needlessly convoluted, it’s way too long, but it is, at least, an entertaining bad film. This was probably my third or fourth viewing of Renny Harlin’s fishy masterpiece, and I’m almost certain that it won’t be my last.
To conclude. This is a terrible film. But it’s a great terrible film.