Deep Blue Sea

Viewed August 28, 1999 at Century Park 12

This was a real treat, a fun way to begin my first ever late-night "discount double-feature".  At $8.25 a pop and only your brother as company, it's the way to go. 

With our snuck-in cans of soda pop (opened ever-so discreetly during the noisy previews) in either side of my (brand withheld) jacket, we entered the theater, and got ourselves a couple of nice seats in the middle.  Even at a movie that's been out as long as this one, there's a buzz among the crowd before the first evening show.  For one, there were at least a couple of kid birthday parties present, entire rows occupied by ballcapped children and bookended by frazzled parents.  When the Coca-Cola slide show displayed: "Do the wave if you loved Jerry Maguire," a row of junior high arms flew out before me.  Later, when an usher roamed the aisles with a donations tub for the Will Rogers Institute, the kids would lure him over with their waving hands, then shoo him off, laughing at their trickery. 

My brother noticed two middle-aged European looking (read: wearing suits and sandals) men each escorting an Asian man half their age.  My brother got nervous when the Sting lookalike sat next to him and said, "And how are you this evening?"  After my brother got up "to get popcorn" (and returned to sit at my other side) the man turned to his companion, patted his knee and said, "You'd better be careful, I can get very excited at this kind of movie."  Yep, another exciting night at the movies.

On to the movie: give credit to Renny Harlin for knowing his cliches and knowing how to evade most of them.  The moments of anticipation are kept off-rhythm, so the excitement continually comes at unexpected times with unexpected results.  Key examples are Stellan Skarsgaard's death, the result of L.L. Cool J's kitchen encounter, and Samuel L. Jackson's bravura speech.  The sharks aren't bad for computer- generated images, though the script loses a lot of strategic force by not making the three sharks' specific location at any given point in the plot a factor.  Instead the sharks have a vague omnipresence, so that in this rather immense, water-logged research complex, whereever there are humans and water, there could be sharks. 

The movie seems to focus our attention not so much on how the humans will get out of this predicament as it has us guessing who will be left uneaten by the end of the movie.  That could be because the characters are all well defined in their roles; the heedless scientist babe; the survivalist; the corporate leader; the shrieker; the cook, and so on. The lead actress gratuitously strips free of her wetsuit, but I didn't mind that so much.  That, as well as Stellan Skaarsgard crashing through the underwater window and the last scene with Sam L. Jackson, are the images I took with me as I snuck into the second feature.

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