(Note: For background on the new column “Eric’s Ten-Year Itch,” see the first edition, about The Phantom Menace)

Renny Harlin doesn’t get a lot of respect as a filmmaker, and with good reason. His last few films — 12 Rounds, The Covenant, Exorcist: The Beginning, and Mindhunters — have been six shades of ridiculous. But if you look back, he has always skirted the edge between awesome and stupid — he just used to be better at it. Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger strike the right balance. I think Deep Blue Sea does it, too, a hammy story about killer sharks that’s actually pretty thrilling.

That’s basically what I thought when I saw it 10 years ago, too, as a fresh young film critic. Not counting a few scattered reviews I’d written previously, my career as a movie critic for the newspaper that employed me had begun only two months earlier, with Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. But by midsummer, when Deep Blue Sea came around, I felt like I was in the groove, writing brief capsule reviews of everything that came out and full-length reviews whenever I could convince the editor of the entertainment section to give me enough space. A few months later, when I became the section editor, there started being, coincidentally, a lot more space for my reviews.

At any rate, I felt comfortable with the movie-reviewing game by now. New critics, especially young ones (I was not quite 25), have a tendency to second-guess themselves when they disagree with the consensus, but I was past that now. I knew that Deep Blue Sea had entertained and surprised me, and I had no problem saying so, even if it belonged to an often-junky genre and was getting negative reviews from quite a few other critics. (We will see in later weeks that in some cases I should have been embarrassed by the opinions I was offering.)

I gave the film a B+. I wrote: “You can rest assured that you can never rest assured of anything in this movie. Your horror-movie expectations of who will die and who won’t, and when scary things will happen and when they won’t, are toyed with and then ripped to pieces. I can think of at least two moments that left me with my jaw wide open, shaking my head and thinking, ‘That did NOT just happen.’”

Revisiting the film now, I find that, as usual, I might have overstated things. There are definitely a couple jaw-dropping moments, and the film holds up as a solid B-movie that’s scary fun without being too insulting to your intelligence. But it’s basically a slasher movie, with three sharks in place of a hockey-masked psychopath, and now that I’ve seen more slasher movies I see how formulaic Deep Blue Sea really is. Apart from one death that I’ll talk about later, the characters get bumped off in approximately the order you’d expect, and at the usual intervals.

The whole thing is also, lest we forget, preposterous. It’s one of those “don’t tamper in God’s domain” cautionary tales, set at an undersea research facility where Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) is trying to cure Alzheimer’s by messing with sharks’ brains. But, as she explains after it’s too late and everything has hit the fan, sharks’ brains aren’t big enough to produce the quantity of proteins she needed, so she did some genetic tampering to make their brains bigger. “As a side effect,” she says, “the sharks got smarter.” Yes, increasing their brain size somehow — unforeseeably! — also made them more intelligent. Another character, speaking for the audience, responds to Susan succinctly: “You stupid b****.”

Given that we now have intelligent sharks flooding the research facility and hunting the humans, the film does the best it can to make the humans’ actions plausible and reasonable. There are lapses in science (I don’t think any of the ways the sharks are killed would work in real life), but not as much in logic. I wrote in 1999: “Everyone seems to have motivation for his or her actions, and no one walks into any dark basements, metaphorically speaking.” For me, that goes a long way toward making a horror film scary rather than frustrating. If the characters are doing what I would do (because I’m smart, after all) and still they find themselves in danger, then it must truly be a perilous situation.

And now a few words about Samuel L. Jackson, and here we get into spoiler territory if you haven’t seen the film. Jackson plays the suit who’s financing Susan’s research and has come to spend the weekend at the facility to see firsthand what she’s up to. (The film is an homage to Jaws, of course, but it also closely resembles another Spielberg film: Jurassic Park.)

I don’t know if the men behind Snakes on a Plane had seen Deep Blue Sea when they chose Samuel L. Jackson for their leading man, but parts of his performance in the shark movie read like an audition for the snake movie. Jackson’s climactic speech, when the survivors are bickering about what to do, is delivered with his usual fire-and-brimstone righteousness, and it sounds like it’s leading up to “I’ve had it with these mother-effing sharks in this mother-effing undersea research facility!”

It actually goes like this, with Jackson’s character recounting his previous brush with death in an avalanche. In the DVD commentary, Jackson jokingly calls it his “big Shakespearean moment.”

Enough! That’s enough now, from all of you! You think water’s fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. When the avalanche came, it took us a week to climb out. And somewhere, we lost hope. Now, I don’t know exactly when we turned on each other, I just know that seven of us survived the slide … and only five made it out. Now we took an oath that I’m breaking now. Swore we’d say it was the snow that killed the other two. But it wasn’t. Nature can be lethal, but it doesn’t hold a candle to man.

Now, you’ve seen how bad things can get, and how quick they can get that way. Well, they can get a whole lot worse. So we’re NOT! Going to FIGHT! ANYMORE! We’re going to pull together, and we’re gonna find a way to get out of here! First, we’re gonna seal off this–

The speech ends abruptly when a shark leaps out of the water and eats him. I mean it when I say that this has got to be one of the best scenes of unexpected death in movie history. Jackson is the most famous actor in the cast, his character is emerging as the leader, and now he’s taken out in the most surprising, out-of-nowhere manner possible. It’s a genuinely shocking and darkly comic moment, and it means that now we don’t know who — if anyone — will survive.

Harlin says in the DVD commentary that he intentionally made the speech “corny” and “pompous” to heighten the effect. He wanted audiences to be rolling their eyes by the time the shark showed up. Taken in that light, the speech is almost a parody of the speech that inspired it, Robert Shaw’s haunting tale in Jaws about a shipwrecked crew being eaten by a pack of sharks. You may recall that that speech ends with a jolt, too, albeit a much less lethal one.

I don’t think it was intentional, however, to have so much of the dialogue elsewhere in the movie sound so cheesy, nor for the actors to deliver it in such a stilted fashion. Having comic-relief character LL Cool J rap about sharks over the closing credits is another example of Harlin walking the line between dumb fun and just dumb. But once the mayhem begins, about 30 minutes in, the flick is exciting and thoroughly enjoyable. I’ll say it just as proudly now as I did 10 years ago.

Deep Blue Sea

1999 Eric says: Your horror-movie expectations of who will die and who won’t, and when scary things will happen and when they won’t, are toyed with and then ripped to pieces…. Aside from the surprise factor, this happens to be a good film anyway, with an especially good musical underscore and refreshingly non-stupid, non-teenage characters…. There are a few moments of far-fetchedness, and they stick out like sore thumbs in a movie that is otherwise pretty fresh. Grade: B+

2009 Eric says: Once you get past the campy dialogue and stiff performances, Deep Blue Sea is a perfectly legitimate monster movie with a lot of good scares and thrilling sequences. Renny Harlin has his faults, but the man knows how to shoot an action film in a way that’s clear, exciting, and not too serious. Grade: B

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Eric’s Ten-Year Itch runs on occasional Mondays, in rotation with Eric’s Time Capsule. You can visit Eric at his website, but keep in mind his brain isn’t large enough to give you the proteins you need.

Tags: deep blue sea, renny harlin