Mighty Fish Brains - DEEP BLUE SEA

I tend to be biased about decades.  Not intentionally, it just happens.  I’ve come to regard the ‘70s as the greatest era in modern cinema, and I’ve always thought of the ‘80s as the most fun.  I even respect the strange dance between meticulously crafted blockbusters and tiny, heartfelt indies of today.  For some reason, I can’t even think of the 2000s as a decade, probably because it can’t be shortened into a cool sounding range (don’t even try to call it the Aughts, that’s just stupid).  Any scale has to have highs and lows, even arbitrary ones, and for me, the ‘90s gets the low.  Which is ridiculous, because an ocean of great movies came out in the ‘90s.  Tarantino came from the ‘90s, for god’s sake.  Objectively, I know this.  Some of our strongest held opinions come from the gut, though, and the gut is most often full of shit.

My unsubstantiated disdain likely comes from the changing theatrical landscape.  Local theaters and drive-ins were replaced by multiplexes.  Horror had withered and died on the big screen until Wes Craven reinvigorated the genre (again), but most of the glossy, over produced shockers than followed SCREAM felt toothless.  B-movies were squeezed out of the theaters and mutated into DTV (Direct to Video), which was harder to navigate because the Bland Photoshopped Floating Heads movie poster style made all DVD covers indistinguishable (you are not getting off the hook for that shit, The ‘90s).  The rise of the Indies might have brought loads of adorable quirk, but the decade felt devoid of the weird, cheap, inexplicable stuff that I love.

Again, I am totally wrong about that.  Weird stuff was still being made in the ‘90s.  I’ve covered a ton of it, (THE DARK BACKWARD, anyone?) in fact.   It mostly lived in the low budget, under the radar corners of the ´90s (as it did in every era), but the weird would occasionally crop up in a (modestly) big-time studio release.  For proof of this, look no further than the works of quintessential ‘90s director Renny Harlin.  Specifically, look at 1999’s smart shark adventure, DEEP BLUE SEA, because that shit is nuts.

The Capsule:

Billionaire adventurer Russell Franklin (Sam Jackson) gives chilly geneticist Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) 48 hours to convince him that her shark based Alzheimer’s treatment research is worth all the bad PR (over-privileged Spring Breakers almost getting eaten and the like).  She takes him to Aquatica, the fancy sea lab he paid for, to see the results in person.  He’s introduced to her mismatched team of oddballs, including equally serious scientist Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård), less serious facility engineer Tom Scoggins (Michael Rapaport), and utterly ridiculous chief Preacher (LL Cool J).  Franklin also meets the head shark whisperer, Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), right after he’s done showing off by wrestling a 12 foot tiger shark.  McAlester and Whitlock succeed in wowing Franklin, all thanks to the genetically enhanced brains of their three pet mako sharks.  Shockingly, it turns out that making massive, saw toothed killing machines really, really smart might not be the best idea after all when a disaster traps everyone in the rapidly flooding sea lab.  The crew desperately races to escape rising water and hungry jaws, while the brainy sharks might have more in mind than just snacking on scientists.

Renny Harlin was always a Hollywood outsider, even when directing big budget action blockbusters like DIE HARD 2 and CLIFFHANGER.  He walks the line between delivering on expectations and subverting them.  He'll deliver the goods, just not always by the obvious route.  It's what makes his movies stand out.  THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was his masterwork (with generous help from Shane Black's whip smart script).  Not even the smartest shark in the ocean could compete with Charly Baltimore, but DEEP BLUE SEA is such an entertaining mix of clever and stupid that it works all on its own.

From the showy, bombastic double punch of disaster action that gets the ball rolling—the slow-mo fury of a hurricane directly transitioning into an orgy of explosions—it seems like we’re in for a pretty, yet predictable, Jerry Bruckheimer style outing.  Once inside the sinking lab, however, everything becomes claustrophobic and palpably tense.  The half-submerged environment highlights the disadvantages of being human: they move slowly through water, they can’t see what’s coming, they are soft and chewable.

The movie is filled with fun, left field moments, but the kicker is undoubtedly Sam Jackson’s Hero Speech.  Roughly halfway in, when the survivors are bickering and demoralized, Russel Franklin steps up and takes charge.  Every eye is on him as he reveals his tragic backstory and the hard lessons it taught him about survival.  If they want to get out of this alive, he explains, they must bury their fear and work together.  It’s all very inspirational, right up to the point where [Spoiler] a shark jumps out of the pool behind him and bites him in half.   It’s a hilariously shocking moment, and while it has lost some of its impact from the countless times it has been copied, I still get a giddy charge watching it.

Not everything works.  The CGI effects are laughably outdated (the storm waves are on par with a Playstation 2 cut scene).  The three sharks are indistinguishable, and their  proportions vary wildly depending on the scene.  Michael Rapaport, the official mascot of the ’90s, runs his bro-y New York pessimist routine into the ground within minutes and literally cannot get killed fast enough (sorry Michael, you were great in COPLAND and BEAUTIFUL GIRLS, playing basically the same character).  LL Cool J, on the other hand, unself-consciously owns his comic relief status and become one of the most entertaining parts of the film.  I love that Harlin was bold enough to give him a potty mouthed parrot sidekick and smart enough to get rid of it just before the gag gets tired.  

His character of Preacher fares much better, as well, continuing the maxim that the safest person to be in a ‘90s horror/monster movie is a rapper.  This was a direct reaction to the criticism that black guys always died first in horror movies (a huge exaggeration, the black guy always died first in action movies, not horror).  Like Ice Cube in ANACONDA and LL again in HALLOWEEN H20, DEEP BLUE SEA teases his death mercilessly.  In probably the best sequence in the movie, Preacher narrowly escapes a shark chasing him through his flooded kitchen by climbing into an industrial oven.  Obviously, this is not the best place to hide, but as long as—goddamn it, the shark turned on the oven (just the gas part, the movie isn’t completely sadistic).  The joke's on the shark, though, because not only does Preacher manage to escape the oven, he uses the gas to blow the brainy bastard up.  LL might be the comic relief, but he gets his share of badass moments.

The most dangerous thing about the sharks isn't their super intelligence or their toothy maws, but that all three, including the female, are total dicks.   You can tell right from the beginning because all the smart sharks eat are other, dumber sharks.  Once they start dining on the crew, it’s not enough to just kill them, the jerks turn each death into a big bloody display to rub it in the survivors’ faces.   “Ha ha, I’m eating your friend!”  

The worst indignities go to Skarsgård’s poor Dr. Whitlock.  First, he gets his arm bitten off while celebrating a successful demonstration.  Then the medevac helicopter accidentally drops his gurney into the shark tank.  Before they can reel him back up, the sharks zoom off with him, dragging down the helicopter in the process.  That crash results in a firestorm that kills a bunch more people and starts flooding the lab.  Wait, there’s more.  While everyone below deck tries to figure out what the hell just happened, a shark swims towards the window, Whitlock’s gurney its jaws—complete with a still conscious Whitlock in a breathing mask.  The shark sends the terrified scientist smashing head first into the window, right in front his girlfriend, no less.  What an asshole.  

Harlin wisely emphasizes the absurdity of the super intelligent sharks.  They are practically elevated to the level of a Bond movie mastermind.  They can work as a team, pick locks, and set traps.  They even sabotage the lab’s only sub, the nautical equivalent of the killer disabling the teens' car engine in a slasher.  The crowning moment is when Carter Blake realizes that the ENTIRE string of events was orchestrated by the sharks so they could escape into open waters.  I’ll bet even the hurricane was part of their plan.  My one regret is that the boss girl shark didn’t fashion some sort of telepathic Speak & Spell gizmo so she could deliver a villain monologue.  “What’s wrong, Mr. Blake?  You’re looking a little…green around the gills.”

At its heart, DEEP BLUE SEA is more Frankenstein fable than Sharksploitation.  While super entertaining, it has the same problem I have with in all Frankenstein fables, the Science Is Bad sermon.  When Dr. McAlester makes the effort to save her research, work that could bring about an end to mental degenerative diseases, one of her coworkers takes the moral highwater and asks if it was worth the lives of her whole team.  Not to sound insensitive, but yeah, in that case it actually is.   I’ve always been pro-mad science, but McAlester clearly had noble aspirations, if not the best execution (maybe you should have given the big brain to a nurse shark instead of a mako).  Save your shame for the guys who make dangerous creatures for the sake of amusement parks.  The movie definitely favors street smarts over book smarts, as far as survivors go.  On the other hand, McAlester gets to use her ivy league brain to safely electrocute a shark while in her underwear, so science has its advantages.

Clearly, I have no right to be down on the '90s.  That decade of filmmaking had a style just as distinct and authentic as any other.  Great works were made.  Next time I doubt it, I need look no farther than the DEEP BLUE SEA credits, where LL Cool J performs the movie's theme song, Deepest Bluest, from the shark's perspective.  Nothing sums up the '90s more than that.

C Chaka

Dumb Person Shooter: DOOM

Video game movies are never a safe bet.  There have been moderate successes, but nothing on the level of, say, movies made from amusement park rides (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN).  They do, at least, fare better than board game movies (BATTLESHIP, OUIJA, SCRABBLE).  The biggest reason why they rarely live up to expectations is that games and movies are totally different mediums that don’t lend themselves to each other.  Games tend to be 15% story and 85% doing shit.  Even for the high budget titles featuring tons of cinematic cutscenes, most of the game is spent running around in real time dealing with repeating challenges.  This method doesn’t fit well with movies.  The only video game movie I can think of that was successful with this method is HARDCORE HENRY, and it isn’t actually based on a game.  Most video game movies do the inverse.  They expand out the story, rearranging or inventing key elements, and reduce the game play aspects to nods and references.  This approach rarely leaves anyone happy, but it is exactly what they did with the 2005 first person shooter inspired DOOM.  The good news is that there is still fun to be had, as long as you set your expectations low enough.  I suggest subterranean.

The Capsule:

It’s 2046 and bad shit is going down on a Mars research base.  Scientists have unleashed a destructive force that endangers the compound’s entire population.  If it breaches the teleporter, Earth itself may be at risk.  A marine unit led by Sarge (The Rock, pre Dwayne Johnson, or even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is sent in for rescue/containment.  As their numbers drop, they realize that all their firepower might not be enough to stop the unnatural menace lurking in the dark corridors.  They will also need bombs and punching.

There’s no getting around it, this is a dumb movie.  It hangs together fairly well on the surface, but if you start to really think about almost any aspect of the story, nothing makes sense.  Say, for instance, you discovered that the ancient Martians were monkeying around with genetic engineering just before they wiped their entire species out.  Should replicating those experiments – on death row inmates, for god’s sake – be your next logical step?  It’s the kind of dumb that I find endearing, though.  Like when a couple of marines are tensely searching the dead silent med lab and all the caged animals suddenly start making noise at once, as if they were waiting to yell “surprise” at a party.  Or the fact that the small Martian compound has an elaborate, city sized sewer system.  Also, instead of sneaking in the names of horror directors, the hunted scientists from the beginning have the names of the game designers.  

The US Marine Corps must have really lowered their standards by the year 2046.  The motley collection of grunts is clearly modeled after the Colonial Marines from ALIENS, but way more ridiculous.  First of all, everyone goes by a nickname, even when they are talking to civilians.  Is anyone going to take this guy seriously when he introduces himself simply as “Sarge”?  Yes, because he is played by The Rock.  You always take the Rock seriously, unless he’s playing a tooth fairy.  

Fittingly, the team is introduced by their talking guns.  Goat is an uptight religious weirdo who carves a cross into his forearm every time he blasphemes.   I guess a cuss jar is too awkward to carry on a mission.  Duke is the smooth talking lady’s man.  Destroyer is the silent type carrying the big gun.  Mac is the guy too insignificant to have a cool nickname.  Portman is the white trash pervert who is a really big fan of Natalie Portman, I guess.  They even have a nervous young rookie named The Kid, because why wouldn’t they?  

Rounding out the team is Karl Urban’s Reaper, who is the only person to have a real name (it’s John Grimm, get it?).  This is Urban’s dry run for playing Judge Dredd seven years later in DREDD.  Reaper is a dour soldier haunted by a Childhood Trauma, which, of course, happened on Mars.  He doesn’t have Dredd’s supreme confidence and resolution.  Reaper is more quietly introspective and full of doubt, especially when dealing with his estranged sister, Samantha, who, coincidentally, works at the Mars base.   Urban does a good job of portraying a man trying to keep both his pain and his potential locked down, but not always succeeding.  His performance is more effective than his hokey, generic family tragedy backstory deserves.  

Rosamund Pike (the GONE GIRL herself) does a nice job as Sam, being appropriately annoyed and concerned about him.  She needles him about giving up on science for a career of shooting things.  I believed them as siblings, though not necessarily as twins (one marine asks if they are identical, not sure if he was being ironic).  She is the smartest person in the movie (not a huge feat) and is brave without needing a gun.  Her American accent wanders a bit (Mid-West? Southern?), but otherwise, she’s a solid character.  Aside from Sarge, Reaper, and Sam, everyone else is pretty disposable.  It’s appropriate, since that’s what happens to them.

Several of the game’s iconic monsters are well represented by Stan Winston Studios (though not Stan Winston himself).  When people are infected, they change from zombies into Imps (Alien/Pumpkinhead type things with detachable worm tongues) into Hell Knights (big ass Imps).  The zombies are fairly standard, but the later stage monsters are all imposing and visceral.  Professional freaky monster actor Doug Jones (HELLBOY, PAN’S LABRINTH) plays various different beasties, infusing them with his decidedly unhuman physicality and grace. There’s a cool scene where one of the imps gets stuck halfway through a futuristic door when it rematerializes, and he keeps twitching in the background.  There are only a few monsters at first, but the floodgates open up near the end.  One guy, a bureaucrat who lost his lower half in a teleporter accident, turns into a pink, eyeless demon bulldog dragging a Segway-like trolley behind it.  That was a nice touch.

The most innovative – and goofiest – part of the movie is the first person shooter sequence.  It was the gimmick the entire movie was built upon.  Near the end, Reaper has to fight his way through the compound against a hoard of monsters.  He picks up his gun and we go to his (sort of) uninterrupted POV through the whole segment.  I remember being fairly amused the first time I saw it, but that was before HARDCORE HENRY.  That movie managed to use a single person’s POV to tell a (ludicrous) story, include bits of character development, and maintain a frantic pace through the entire film.   The DOOM FPS sequence does not hold up well by comparison.   It actually seems like one of those mid-range amusement park simulator rides.  Everything goes super slowly and precisely.  It’s more like Reaper is having a casual stroll rather than a race against the clock.  I guess the filmmakers figured that if it went by too quickly, as in regular speed, the audience wouldn’t be able to make out what was going on.  Or they would get motion sickness.  It is the complete opposite of immersion.  It practically screams “Now let’s watch our video game sequence!”  There are some things going for it, though.  Like HENRY, it is punched up with comically over the top gore, at least in the unrated version.  It also leads to some hilariously stupid gags, like when Reaper blows up a monster with a mine while standing three feet away.  The explosion liquefies the beastie, but doesn’t even nudge Reaper.  That wouldn’t have even happened in the video game.

Probably the best thing about the movie, though, is The Rock.  At first, it seems like his no-nonsense, badass jarhead will be the lead.  But interestingly, and rather suddenly, [SPOILER coming], he becomes the main bad guy.  The genetic C24 “infection” (the science is iffy here) seeks out and mutates people with psychotic tendencies, but Sarge has a serious mental break well before the monsters ever tag him.  Near the end, he goes into full containment mode, determined to kill everyone who was evacuated from the compound to avoid an outbreak, regardless of if they are infected or not.  Any of his troops who object is shot for insubordination.  At first I thought this change came out of nowhere, but on rewatching, I saw the signs earlier on.  Right in the beginning, as he is listening to his mission orders through the radio, he robotically repeats things like “search and destroy” and “with extreme prejudice” and other phrases which sound like either action movie titles or Trump presidential campaign slogans.  I got the impression that he was so indoctrinated to the corps that he would follow any order blindly.  Sarge was just a well-disciplined psycho waiting for the opportunity to cut loose.

Being The Rock, his showdown with Reaper is impressive.  Reaper himself is juiced up with the experimental C24, which gives nice people like him super healing instead of turning them into monsters.  It makes things a bit fairer.  Urban is a big guy, but he’s no The Rock. The action is shot wide enough to tell what is happening and the editing is clean.  There’s a bit too much reliance on wire work for my taste, otherwise, it’s a solid knock down drag out fight.  They start with the corny tough guy tradition of laying down their guns and putting up their fists.  That always makes me smile.  

It’s not all dumb fun.  There’s some painful dumbness.  It has a terrible score, generic synth and guitar bullshit.  There is a nice Nine Inch Nails song for the credits, otherwise it’s a total loss.  They make a huge deal of the BFG, or Big Fucking Gun, that Sarge carries around, but for all the fetishistic attention, he only shoots it twice and misses both times.  It was a bit of a let down.  Some of the dialogue is creaky, and not always matching the situation.  Someone says “we need to destroy these discs,” while holding up some props that are in no way disc shaped.  On a side note, one of the marines knocks around a Hell Knight by swinging a 2046 era CRT monitor.  We have teleporters and nano doors in this future, but flat screens are out of our technological league.  

This movie can be an amusing distraction, as long as you don’t raise the bar higher than ankle level.  The main actors do a decent job with what they’ve been given, and there are enough weird touches to make it interesting, when you’re not rolling your eyes.  I picked up the DVD for $3.99, and I can confidently say it’s worth every penny.  Before tax.

C Chaka