Flak Magazine: Review of Deep Blue Sea, 7-27-99

“I don’t want you/ But I hate to lose you/ You’ve got me in between the devil and the deep blue sea.” — Lyrics by Ted Koehler as performed by Cab Calloway

I can’t argue that its computer-generated images are not lousy and that much of the dialogue is not strained. In those aspects, it’s the kind of movie you’d expect from the confluence of the creative talents behind The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Batman & Robin, Commando, Cutthroat Island, Lost in Space, Man’s Best Friend and The Mod Squad.

But Deep Blue Sea unequivocally overcomes these deficiencies. It’s the popcorn movie of the summer and one of the best-crafted and most personal action films this decade.

Deep Blue Sea is a work of unexpected majesty from Renny Harlin, a Finnish director best known for breaking up with Geena Davis. Harlin twice directed Davis, and the film that precipitated their split, the unjustly maligned The Long Kiss Goodnight, probed issues of identity and intimacy with surprising alacrity and, well, intimacy.

But that just seemed like a lucky fluke in Harlin’s career; his highest profile effort, Die Hard 2, is the least of that series, and his other films include Fairlane and Cutthroat Island. When it was announced he would direct the megashark thriller Deep Blue Sea, all appearances suggested it would be a return to empty form.

Instead, Deep Blue Sea is an apocalyptic, Calvinist rollercoaster ride (there’s copy for the newspaper ads), a funhouse mirror version of Jaws. Taking a script written by three first-timers, Harlin has crafted an expectation-confounding descent into dark hearts and the supernatural deviltry at which its title hints.

Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) is a neurologist whose experiments with sharks suggest to her that components of their gray matter may reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. In predictable science-is-bad fashion, however, Susan has illegally tampered with their genetic structure, and when she brings her corporate sponsor to Aquatica, her half-undersea lab, things, um, go wrong.

(No one’s impressed, by the way, that you were able to figure out that the plot is Jaws meets Jurassic Park. Truth be told, it’s actually much closer to Alien. Both eerily domesticate an indiscriminate force-of-nature monster a la Jaws — before Jaws, monsters tended to have motives outside of propagation or their empty stomachs — by bringing it into interior spaces. Like Alien’s Nostromo, the gradually collapsing Aquatica is a haunted house of the first order.)

Deep Blue Sea is a shark of a movie, relentlessly propelling itself forward. Dozens of films in the past few years have relied on nonstop action to please their crowds, but few succeed, and very few have this much grace. Not only is there truly never a dull moment, but the film also gets its rhythms exactly right — rather than bombast to the nines, the movie massages its reflective, pregnant moments in so elegantly that they can literally last just as long as it takes to catch your breath before launching into the next escapade. With respect to movies with cacophonic mayhem on their minds, the affective difference between this piano-wire tension and the shrill overload of films like Armageddon has rarely been shaded with more contrast than Harlin offers here.

That may be because the director has imbued so much of himself into Deep Blue Sea, his first film since parting with Davis. The movie opens with two inebriated, promiscuous couples out for an evening of boating on the open seas, and when there’s a knock at the hull and some shark’s-eye-view shots, you think you know what’s coming.

But unlike most horror movies, it’s not these vices that punishment creeps a half-step behind. If anything, the movie’s sharks home in on presumptuousness and sanctimony like, well, sharks to blood, but it would also be fair to say that the sharks’ motivation is, if not arbitrary, unknowable.

The same can’t be said of Harlin's motivation. The film centers on three characters — Burrows’ Susan, peremptory and self-assured but undeniably responsible for this havoc; Thomas Jane’s Carter, the strapping shark wrangler with a marred past; and LL Cool J’s Preacher, the resident chef with far more than sharks on his mind.

With her fine features, Burrows looks like the porcelain doll version of Geena Davis; with his perfect build, auburn hair and boring eyes, Jane looks like the romance-novel-cover version of Harlin. It fits, then, that Susan and Carter have an acrimonious relationship throughout the film, and that their admiration/disdain cycle is the pivot that the movie's emotions whip around.

By the end, this cycle becomes a furious dervish that spins way past conventions — these characters don’t end up like you expect them to. Suffice it to say that by the end of Cab Calloway’s song, the speaker has opted for the devil: the girl who’s hurt him. Harlin’s decision is in his title, and is brought to fearful life in the climax.

Interestingly, the handling of Preacher may be equally autobiographical. In a betrayal of formula, the film forks after the initial onset of disaster. With the lab destroyed and sharks lurking, two parties emerge: the scientific crew and Preacher. Preacher spends the first half of the shark attack isolated from everyone else, and this solo time is designed to bring us close to his skin.

While most of the characters have some good backstory, Preacher becomes very fully developed, offering in a videotaped final testament that he’s been torn between God and the bottle and was “found wanting” as a husband and father. What mark, what thing of value, he solemnly asks the camera, can he leave as his legacy? Pausing, he grinningly begins to describe how to make the perfect omelette.

It’s Harlin. Struggling to stand under the rubble of personal and professional devastation (he hasn’t had a hit since Cliffhanger), he tries to take measure of his soul and can find only his craft. You suspect the Scandinavian director knows something of Preacher’s bootstraps religion and struggles with faith as the character appeals to a God he can’t understand but can’t not put faith in. The film is littered with familiar iconography — Preacher’s crucifix, bleeding hands — and a recurring sacrifice motif. Harlin is struggling with his God and his devils, and the release for that tension is his art.

And it’s never been in finer form. While the mechanical sharks are impressive, their computer-generated counterparts fail to convince, particularly in their numerous graphic eviscerations. Otherwise, however, the film is a technical marvel.

At a base level, it has the highest-quality explosions, floods and production design. But where a lot of directors with the same elements sacrifice sense for sheer grandeur and squander the spectacle of it all, Harlin keeps the reins tight. This is not the sloppy, rapid editing that blanches and disorients. Each cut has been reasoned through, each punchy sound finessed to create a genuine air of terror.

The threat is not just that the invaders can physically harm you; they can make your whole world come apart. From the indelible scene where the sharks are shown gaining passage to Aquatica until the credits roll, it’s nonstop destruction — an orgy of whip-smart set pieces, photo-finish scenarios and hair-stiffening misdirection that even Hitch would delight in.

When the sharks attack, they’re like dragons, demons, as perverse as the science that created them (to the filmmakers, at least — this whole Luddite thing is always very popular in horror). Apocryphally, after one of Preacher’s escapes from their clutches, he tells Susan, “It’s the devil you know.” It’s not clear what he means: Is he asking if she’s aware the monsters are diabolical, or is the statement rather that the reason we fight and endure — even if we only have a less-than-desirable status quo to fight for — because we don’t want to confront the devils we don’t know?

However that exchange is intended, it’s clear Harlin is becoming more intimately acquainted with his own demons. This is a cruel film, but nowhere in it is the hollowness of his nearly-300-dead Die Hard 2. The Harlin of Deep Blue Sea is second-generation sadistic — in his characters’ pain, he finds not pleasure but his own pain, but in that pain he finds a catalyst for his skill. While it’s definitely skewed toward action-movie tastes, the result is nevertheless one of the best films of the year.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)