Why? Because he’s in it for us (dude saves people) and not in it for himself (which LL clearly is). And he’s still this film’s ultimate badass.
MOVIE DEEP BLUE SHARK CRACK
Thomas Jane doesn’t crack jokes (his voice won’t allow for comedic timing), he rides the sharks but doesn’t kill them, and he doesn’t sing. If you break it down, LL Cool J gets the comic relief bits, kills two of the sharks, and raps two songs on the film’s soundtrack. After Deep Blue Sea people would ask that same question but the answer was “Thomas Jane.” On this recent watch of Deep Blue Sea, I honed in on how effortlessly cool Thomas Jane was compared to LL Cool J’s effortful cool. Before Deep Blue Sea, people would ask “What is the measure of a man?” and that would be a philosophical question. This was his Home Run Derby moment, where he went from guy you kind of recognized to dude who got a showcase opportunity and just kept hitting the ball out of the park. And guess what? It was Thomas Jane’s time to shine.
Other than LL Cool J, we have Saffron Burrows, who wasn’t a star and playing the “mad scientist who must pay for crimes against nature” role, so you know she’s doomed, Michael Rappaport, who is no one’s hero and possibly from New York, Jacqueline McKenzie as the scared person who you know for sure is going to get eaten by a shark, and some dude named Thomas Jane, who was best-known from one or two scene roles in Boogie Nights, The Crow: City of Angels, Face/Off, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jackson is out of the picture, it’s really a free-for-all because the biggest star left is LL Cool J, and this is still during the time in horror where the African American character and the comic relief usually didn’t make it to the end of the movie. The difference is you didn’t just stop at “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” but instead had that moment serve the rest of the story.Īs in disaster movies, the ensemble cast goes a long way to making Deep Blue Sea work. Jackson) being killed off at the halfway point during an inspirational survival speech, you’re being sincere in your silliness. When you have your biggest star (Samuel L. When you have a shark in a tornado getting killed by a chainsaw, you’re not being sincere.
MOVIE DEEP BLUE SHARK MOVIE
I think the key to making a good, smart-dumb movie is sincerity in the silliness. If you veer too far into a wink-wink dumb movie, you seem disingenuous. This is an alchemy that’s difficult to perfect. I’ve heard Deep Blue Sea called a smart-dumb movie, which is a terrific description. It’s understandable why he fell out of favor (you can’t get infinite chances when your movies consistently lose studios tens of millions of dollars), but it’s a bummer because this type of action craftsman director is less common nowadays. Looking back at A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Deep Blue Sea, it makes me appreciate the professionalism and sense of fun he brought to genre cinema. Renny Harlin was a big-ticket director for a while. I know he still directs (he made a Hercules movie starring Kellan Lutz), but it’s not the same. He was the right director for the material because he could take a B-premise and inject it with A-production value (besides the CGI of course).
What Deep Blue Sea has going for it is Renny Harlin. The odd thing is, on this watch, I realized I love Deep Blue Sea more because it’s a disaster movie more than a shark movie. The silver medal shark movie to me is Deep Blue Sea, with 47 Meters Down and Open Water behind it (sorry to fans of Jaws 2 and The Shallows). Now I want every shark movie to strive to be the second-best shark movie ever made. No longer do I need a shark movie to try to fight in Jaws’ weight class because that’s impossible. Since then, my expectations for shark movies has shifted. I had unrealistic expectations that night in July 1999 thinking Deep Blue Sea was trying to challenge Jaws. I blame HBO First Look, which tended to make movies feel more consequential than they were. I expected it to be more elevated or serious than it was. Then The Blair Witch Project came out days later and I really felt underwhelmed by Deep Blue Sea. I remember seeing the film on opening night and being underwhelmed. I’ve come to realize that Deep Blue Sea is a perfect B-movie.
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