The film's opening scene is certainly its most surprising violation of the clichés of its genres (it will also prove to be the final surprise until the very end, when the "wrong" character dies): a party of drunk young folks on a boat are attacked by a very damn huge shark, and they do not get eaten.
In fact, Deep Blue Sea proves to be a Tampering In God's Domain film, not a Nature Run Amok film at all. But outside of that, the film as a whole goes almost as far as it is possible to do from the well-established and often-copied Jaws formula.
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And the very same Louisiana license plate that came out of one tiger shark in Jaws comes out of a different tiger shark in Deep Blue Sea. There are particular shots that are taken very nearly without alteration from Jaws: a below-the-water shot of a swimmer's legs, a close up of the hero following the shark with a rifle. There is, for one thing, absolutely no chance that it was an accident that the three main sharks in Deep Blue Sea die the same way, in the same order, as the three main sharks from Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws 3-D (explosion, electrocution, explosion). Like any killer shark movie, Deep Blue Sea exists entirely within the shadow of Jaws, though it owns that debt more pridefully than not. But we do not have that kind of time nor space available to us. It would be a long and pleasant activity to sit with the screenplay by Duncan Kennedy and Donna & Wayne Powers and annotate every last bit of it to explain just how far off the rails it's going in everything from its biology to its physics to its treatment of character behavior to its motor vehicles to.
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It is a movie with a script almost entirely fashioned out of plot holes and inaccuracies, with actual narrative content barely able to peek in around the edges at points. That's one detail out of one and three-quarter hours' worth of details, and absolutely everything in Deep Blue Sea is wholeheartedly misconceived at more or less that same level. Do please note, I have only so far talked about one small thing: the scale of the film's killer sharks. If we are instead distracted by the knowledge that the shark has to be crawling along on its belly and also folded into a U-shape, terror is hardly apt to be the result. This is a giant killer shark movie, after all, and its solitary purpose out in the world is to make us jump in terror at the giant killer sharks. There was apparently confusion between "sharks have flexible cartilage for skeletons" and "sharks are non-Newtonian fluids" at some point in the screenwriting stage.
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And we have also watched these same sharks darting around the corners of hallways (which are, of course, also full of waist-high water), skillfully turning their 26-foot masses through one tight corner after another. Better still, there's a moment in which one of these sharks, in one of these rooms, in just exactly that much water, is able to jump straight up from the surface to mount an attack.
We have here a script that makes a very big deal about having sharks so big that they defy the laws of God and man - the little sharks are 26 feet long - and then puts those sharks in rooms that have flooded with about three and a half feet of water, where they are then able to smoothly glide along with their dorsal fins poking above the surface. It is a very bad film, with some of the most wanton attempts to test the limits of the audience's willing suspension of disbelief that I've ever had the privilege to witness. What we have here, in other words, is an awfully special movie. But to suppose that this is the be-all and end-all of Deep Blue Sea is to do a grave disservice to one of the most delightfully shitty movies of the 1990s and that was, alongside the 1950s, one of the all-time greatest eras for so-bad-it's-good genre films. It is easily the film's cheekiest, most self-aware moment. This is a worthy thing to be known for, undoubtedly. Jackson delivers a big, operatic summer action movie monologue, and then right when he gets the soaring inspirational part, a giant super-intelligent mako shark jumps out of the water behind him and eats him. Pop culture knows Deep Blue Sea, from 1999, as the movie in which Samuel L. A review requested by Patton, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.
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