Deep Blue Sea 25th Anniversary Review: Renny Harlin Effectively Combines Die Hard-Style Action With Sharks
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975 set the benchmark on how a great shark movie should be, and there have been many others trying to follow suit but failed until the arrival of Deep Blue Sea on June 28, 1999. Directed by Renny Harlin, this was his last good movie before he gradually sunk into a series of creative disappointments from 2001 onward (except for 2004’s Mindhunters, which I had a soft spot for that otherwise little-seen And Then There Were None-style crime thriller). How he quickly fell from grace, especially after his promising career in 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and subsequently gave us unforgettable hits including Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger in the ’90s.
Back to Deep Blue Sea, this US$60 million shark thriller was a hit after raking in US$165 million worldwide. Interestingly, the movie didn’t land the No. 1 spot during the opening weekend, settling down at No. 3 instead as Runaway Bride and The Blair Witch Project claimed the respective Top 2 ranking at the time.
Looking back at the movie today, the success of Deep Blue Sea lies in Harlin’s effective blend of horror and action in the mould of a summer popcorn blockbuster with a dash of sci-fi elements since it revolves around the super-intelligent mako sharks. His prior experience in the horror background as seen in Prison and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master allows him to stretch his directorial prowess in staging some suspenseful and violent set pieces that emulate the look and feel of a slasher genre. Combining that with a Die Hard-like action template that takes place within the confines of a remote underwater facility, Harlin has done a good job here without trying to repeat the Jaws-like structure.
The movie’s 105-minute length helps too as Harlin doesn’t waste time getting to the good stuff right from the get-go. We first see the opening scene on how the shark wrangler Carter Blake (Thomas Jane) manages to stop one of the sharks from attacking the young adults on the boat. The shark in question happens to escape from the facility, which worries the corporate bigwig Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson). He threatens to shut down the facility but head researcher Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows in her no-nonsense lead performance) asks him to give her 48 hours to resolve the matter. The facility is a testing ground for experimenting with mako sharks’ brain tissue that might hit the medical breakthrough in curing Alzheimer’s disease.
With Russell onboard with Susan to investigate the facility, the movie also introduces the rest of the characters. This includes marine biologist Janice Higgins (Jacqueline McKenzie), assistant researcher Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård) and other staff such as the cook nicknamed Preacher (LL Cool J, providing the movie’s comic relief), who has a pet parrot accompanying him in the facility’s kitchen.
Working from Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers and Wayne Powers’ screenplay, Harlin offers just enough exposition without overstaying its welcome. And next thing you know, it’s all hell breaks loose after the intelligent mako sharks (a combination of CGI and animatronic effects) start chomping the victims while trying to escape the facility. This leads to the movie’s most memorable scene, which is also one of the greatest surprise character deaths in cinematic history since Janet Leigh in 1960’s Psycho. The first time I watched that scene, I seriously did not expect it from such a movie as Deep Blue Sea since I figured it was going to be a straightforward genre fare.
That particular element of surprise helps to elevate the movie but that’s not just about it. Harlin also subverts the audience’s expectations of who’s going to make it towards the end of the movie, similar to what Ridley Scott did in the first Alien back in 1979. But the ending that we got from the theatrical release turned out to be a reshoot resulting from a test-screening response. However, there has been a fan petition since 2019 demanding the studio (Warner Bros.) to release the original ending but whether we get it at the end of the day remains to be seen.
Frankly, the story about how these mako sharks can be super smart is silly and preposterous. It certainly demands a suspension of disbelief and thankfully, Harlin’s overall assured direction along with his pacey rhythm and an above-average cast made Deep Blue Sea a thoroughly enjoyable piece of summer-movie entertainment. Years after its release, the movie gradually spawned two (unsurprisingly) inferior direct-to-video sequels in 2018 and 2020.
