Surely the whole point of a cheap jack, cash in, direct to video sequel is to capitalize on the success of the first, theatrical movie and try to rake in as much cash before the brand name loses its potency. Well, if that’s true, why the Hell did it take nearly twenty years for a follow up to Renny Harlin’s enjoyably ridiculous Deep Blue Sea to swim onto our screens.
In case of the unlikely event that we’ve forgotten what Harlin’s rambunctious, big budget, chomp-a-thon was all about, simply put, genetically modified sharks with increased intelligence use their enhanced brain matter to escape the floating laboratory that they’re contained in, eat as much of the recognizable cast as they possibly can and get their gilled butts back into the ocean to create a new super race of killer Mako Sharks.
While the sharks went smart, the film went dumb and a slick, entertaining cult movie was born that saw the sharks use Stellen Skarsgärd as a battering ram, the film use Samuel L. Jackson as a red herring and test audiences demanding that the ending be reshoots in order for Saffron Burrows to meet a much toothier fate – but can a hopelessly late, low budget sequel possibly hope to contain even an ounce of mindless fun of the original?
The unlikely named Misty Calhoun is a shark conservationist who is approached by pharmaceutical billionaire Carl Durant to take a trip to the floating research lab, Akhelios, in order to consult on the experiments going on there.
Upon arriving, she and newlywed neuro physiologist/neuro biologist team Daniel and Leslie Kim are introduced to Akhelios’ crew which contains the usual assortment of shark trainers and a computer technician with a Dennis Nedry masters in douchebaggery, but any good feelings she has about this project fades immediately when she learns some of the details.
It seems that the somewhat unscrupulous Durant has been fiddling with the brains of a quintet of Bull Sharks, training them to follow the Jurassic World style commands of grizzled Owen Grady wannabe, Trent Slater, but unbeknownst to everyone else, Durant is finding all this Franken-fish malarkey in order to make himself smarter to counteract his phobia that modern technology will soon overtake mankind – no, really. As the soft, fleshy humans go about their bland little side-plots and arcs, the sharks have already started plotting their escape by trying to dig a tunnel under the electrified fence like an aquamarine version of The Great Escape and Misty has been summoned to figure out why their leader, Bella, is acting like the bird fish of Alcatraz.
It turns out, Bella is somehow pregnant, which has strengthened her resolve to bust out of this deep sea pokey while consuming any airbreathing motherfucker who looks at her funny and soon, a very familiar struggle for survival ensues where prisoners and guard become predator and prey. Can this clutch of handlers and scientists (who, coincidentally, all look good in swimsuits) manage to keep their gilled charges contained while pulling off the neat trick of staying alive.
Rushed sequels to slick, killer animal movies are nothing new, Hell, the other two big examples of nature run amok, Anaconda and Lake Placid not only have a clutch of similar sequels each, but they even had a versus movie to boot that pretty much all sucked, but at least were released fairly close to the original movie.
However, one thing those films didn’t have was an inexplicable, James Bond style opening credits sequence set to a cringe inducing song named “Into The Blue”, which sets you up perfectly for what you’re about to experience for the next hour and a half.
That experience consists of the movie enacting pretty much the same movie as last time, except with a few minor changes but crammed into a shorter runtime and with a condensed budget. It’s like the screen writer literally just copied the first film’s homework but just threw in the odd change just avoid a’stint in detention. Remember Jackson’s benevolent but misguided billionaire? Well, what is he was fucking nuts instead and was also experimenting on himself with actual equations hilariously appearing on the screen after he doses himself like that meme of Sarah Paulson looking confused? What if the alpha shark, Bella was preggers and disgorges a clutch of baby’s that pick a man clean like jacked-up piranha? What if the female lead wasn’t a complete bitch?
It may be an obvious example of sequelizing by numbers, but matters aren’t helped by the fact that the follow up also hues too close to the original, but instead of going all “Jaws Indoors”, instead delivers nothing but “Jaws With Flaws”. There’s a wet room sequence that’s virtually identical and plenty of shot of people wandering down partially submerged corridors, but despite all the “shock” deaths (can it really be described as a shock death if you don’t give a single shit about any of the victims?), Deep Blue Sea 2 ends up being as deep as a puddle.
Still, the production values are better than I expected (although the later scenes all blatently look like they were shot in the same corridor) and undemanding greyhounds will be pleased to know that the kills are plentiful, but what will attract bad movie connoisseurs like blood in the water is some truly abysmal dialogue.
Not only is every bout of complicated mansplaining aimed at people who are experts followed by a cursory “as I’m sure you’re aware”, but we also get the standard, hysterical “sharks cant do that!” schtick whenever they do anything slightly odd (calm down people, it ate a camera, it didn’t strip and rebuild an AK.47 in ten seconds). Elsewhere, Misty spends a lot of the time equating Bull Sharks as the ocean’s equivalent of Hannibal Lector while sporting a cleavage so prominent it could guest star on Baywatch. But while its admittedly masochistic fun picking through lines like “So a neuro physiologist, a neuro biologist and a shark conservationist enter a bar. What’s the punchline?”, it’s constantly frustrating that the movie sidelines its formation swimming bull sharks with the cheaper, less impressive, flesh stripping baby sharks which, for some reason screech like Velociraptors.
A sequel so dumb, it makes its predecessor look like a waterlogged Inception, the movie doesn’t even gave the sense of fun to name itself Deep Blue Sequel.
“These sharks can suck my ass!” yells one guy at a particularly stressful moment – I totally agree, my guy. I totally agree.
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