To research for this review (heh… snigger) I decided to not re-watch Deep Blue Sea (once was enough, and I can get my Saffron Burrows and LL Cool J fixes nowadays from Law and Order: Criminal Intent and NCIS:LA respectively). Instead, I watched the Inside Nature’s Giants episode (emphasis on ‘inside’) about the great white shark. Now I’m normally queasy at the best of times. I turn my head when someone gets injured on the news. I once watched a YouTube clip of a kickboxer disconnecting his leg over someone’s head. I didn’t sleep for two days. I just stayed in bed not able to get out for fear of slipping over and disconnecting my own leg over my own head.

Um, okay… a little personal. Where was I?

Inside Nature’s Giants; they gut this six-meter great white shark to learn how it ticks. Did you know they have three livers, each the length of a human being, a stomach they can entirely vomit out of their mouths to remove any indigestible boney bits, and ever forming rows of teeth should they ever break off any. Oh, and their brains. Okay, they’re like the size of a marble. But, hey, you can’t get everything in life. They’ve had to settle for being top of the food chain for 70% of the Earth’s surface area.

Which makes the plot for this movie even more stupid…. and more enticing.

I love crazy scientists. Everything just makes so much sense to them. You want to cure Alzheimer’s. You think the cure is in the brain of a shark (yep, the marble). But you can’t get enough of the good juice out of a shark’s brain. So what do you do? Get more sharks? No, what would be the point of that? Let’s make their brains bigger! Then we can drain more juice, then BOOM, that Nobel Prize is ours! What could go wrong?

Well, apart from the sharks wising up. And then they trying to kill you, sink your deep-sea research facility and escape out into the deep blue sea. But not before the previously-mentioned killing you.

Cue standard mutant animals attack movie.

On the menu today, a rugged shark wrangler (Punisher washout Thomas Jane), a hot scientist (Burrows), a random girl you just know has no hope (Aussie Jacqueline McKenzie), a Caucasian comedian (Michael Rapaport), and importantly a African-American comedian (LL Cool J), because you just know the white guy is going to get a bit grating after a while. And of course he gets a stupid unrelated job (a chef). Oh, and of course, Samuel L. Jackson playing…Samuel L. Jackson.

Good points: every line from LL Cool J. “Like black men don’t have enough ways to get killed without climbing up some stupid ass mountain in the middle of God’s nowhere! You leave that to the white folks! Brother!” or even “Einstein’s theory of relativity. Grab hold of a hot pan, second can seem like an hour. Put your hands on a hot woman, an hour can seem like a second. It’s all relative”. (Wait, shouldn’t there be a ‘Brother!’ at the end of that quote?)

Bad points: the plot. But you probably figured that already. And SPOILER ALERT!, killing the main character with about two minutes remaining. Deep Blue Sea was certainly the first movie that I can remember that did that, particularly so pointlessly. If one reliable source is to be believed (Wikipedia is reliable, right?) Saffron Burrows’s hot scientist, slightly unethical character was so unpopular in test audiences that they were cheering on the sharks. So they reshot the ending, she get’s the chop (and munch), and LL Cool J gets a reprieve (Amen, Brother!).

But could they come up with a better ending? The situation: you need to get the attention of the shark before he escapes, and what better way to do so then with free-flowing blood? So sure, cut yourself, hold your hand above the water, drop some blood in, and he just won’t be able to say no. What you don’t do is swim ten meters out into the water, then try and double back when you realize you’re in a spot of bother. I thought you were a scientist!

Back to more learning from Inside Nature’s Giants. Sharks don’t even like eating human beings. We’re too boney. You’re twenty times more likely to die from a lightning strike than a shark. In fact, even if they do try to bite you, the first bite is more likely just to see how tasty you are, and the shark quickly figures out they’d rather skip you as a meal and wait for that tasty blubber seal on the horizon. Mind you, if I was the shark who had just had their brain messed with and enlarged unnecessarily, I would also be pissed me off no end, particularly since I am now smart enough to know that I’m pissed off no end. But here’s the kicker; they’ve also made you smart enough to plan your intricate revenge against your captors, picking them off one by one.

Boy are those humans stupid.

  -- William Cashin

NEXT >