Review: “Deep Blue Sea 3”

 

POGUE, John (Dir.), “Deep Blue Sea 3”, Roserock Productions/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2020.

This is my 550^th post at this blog and I thought I would commemorate it by doing something a little trademark-y, something representative of what I do here on a regular basis. Looking around though, there was little of a Lovecraftian nature that I had to hand to discuss. I thought of doing a Library Generation Table but my eyes began to glaze over; ditto another Phobia. I thought – “was there a Rip-It-&-Run subject to explore?” - there was not. I was already committed to doing handouts for “Spawn of Azathoth” but that’s an Herculean task that will go on seemingly forever. So, I went out into the world to see if I could find something and – bam! – I found this: a shark flick. That would do nicely.

To be honest, I hadn’t heard that there was a “Deep Blue Sea 2” – obviously, it wasn’t deemed worthy of an antipodean cinema or video release - and – looking up reviews of it online – I can see why. It gets universally panned as the absolute worst kind of horror-show. The first movie still rates as one of my favourite action/horror films, despite some woeful inclusions, but I’ve never thought that it was remotely worthy of a sequel. Obviously, I don’t work in movie production! Exploring further though, it seems that this film is a sequel to the second, not necessarily of the first, given that there’s very little that connects the initial movie with its so-called follow-up.

The basic premise of all these movies is that deluded science-y types find a reason to increase the size of shark’s brains and become shocked to discover that they then get smarter! We’re told in “Deep Blue Sea” that the purpose of this tinkering is to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, a worthy goal in and of itself. Why they chose to experiment on Mako sharks though, is one of the glaring and unanswered questions which I took away with me: surely a Wobbegong or a Basking Shark, even a sizable Grey Nurse, or Whale Shark would have sufficed? And how about rays? Manta Rays are plenty big and they’re definitely not equipped with teeth. Essentially, they could have picked on a bunch of sharks that are way down on the aggression scale, but no – they had to go hard, or go home.

Of course, one reason that they needed Mako sharks (for the purposes of the movie, not the tenuous reasoning of the plot) was that Mako sharks jump. In the first film they destroy the underwater research base because sinking it drops the height of the sea pen fences and allows them to jump over them to freedom. In “Deep Blue Sea 2” and three, it’s Bull Sharks that get the gong. Why Bull Sharks? Well, interestingly, these are one of very few sharks species who sport a gland near their cloaca which absorbs and releases salt into and out of the shark’s system as needed, allowing them to spend extended periods in fresh water, should they so choose. Bull Sharks notoriously occupy river mouths in Australia and South Africa during fish spawning seasons and many swimming folk who believe that they’re safe outside of salt water often get the (last) surprise of their lives. Bull Sharks have been found in freshwater lakes and dams 80kms inland from the Queensland coast after hurricanes and floods left them stranded there. Look up the word “adaptable” in a dictionary, you’ll see a picture of a Bull Shark.

Not having seen the second film I’m unsure if there was a pseudo-scientific rationale for using Bull Sharks; but, in this movie, we don’t have to worry about that – here, we learn that three male sharks have escaped the science facility along with their mother, and that their spawning corporate agency is keen to re-capture or kill them before they cause any trouble. That’s the kind of trouble that only sharks with mega-brains and the ability to swim in fresh water can devise which, from what happens next, is not that worrisome, compared to what the humans get up to.

Like the first film, this narrative is built upon a bog-standard Cyberpunk premise: big, flashy science is happening, paid for by Corporate cash, and vested Corporate goals are slowly revealed as the plot unfolds, prompting questions along the lines of ‘sure, we can; but should we?’. In this instalment, there’s a lot of talk about climate change (which they get hopelessly wrong, but kudos for bringing it up anyway) and the impact of rising sea levels on coastal communities (human and otherwise). Our science boffins are monitoring Great White Sharks offshore from an abandoned island fishing community named “Little Happy” (for reasons). They have an “AI” and underwater sensors which track every creature moving in the water around the island and our intrepid boffin-leader is best friends with the Alpha-female Great White, named “Sally”. Into this peaceful environment blunders a shipload of muscularly testosteronal corporate thugs who commandeer Little Happy in order to destroy the rogue Bull Sharks who have moved in, treating it as a convenient smorgasbord. Arguments ensue about whether they should capture or kill the sharks, and it quickly becomes obvious that the corporate bad-guys just want to cover their tracks by killing the creatures – and any- or everything else along with them – as quickly as possible. That includes the humans. It rapidly becomes a fight to save Little Happy from the baddies who want to blow it to Kingdom Come.

It takes some time – with some unexpected singing along the way – to get to this stage in the proceedings and there’s a lot of high-minded philosophising en route which only serves to make sure that the audience gets in some useful eye exercises – by rolling them. A lot. And when everyone gets down to it in the end – when we know exactly where everyone stands in this scenario – the final action sequences are peculiarly lacklustre. There are a couple of fist fights, an explosion, a (heavily narratively-weighted) spear is thrown (which misses), and the last shark swims into a… is it a telephone booth? An air-conditioning unit? It’s annoyingly unclear what this thing is and it’s not at all flagged at the start of the movie, but it pops the last shark quite effectively, whatever it was. I was sensing the absence of a scene, cut from an earlier edit of the movie, that should have been left in… I was also left wondering whether the film crew had ever even seen an action movie before, so unhandily was all of this managed.

And that fiendish anal gland of the Bull Sharks, allowing them to breathe fresh water? ‘Doesn’t come up. ‘Doesn’t get used in the story at all. At one point the bad guys claim that the sharks attacked someone in an African river, but it turns out that they were lying to (literally) cover their tracks. So why mention it at all? Maybe there was a point to it in the previous film…

Like many other movies of this type, it was fairly obvious going in who would die and who would live. This franchise (and I’m still amazed that it has become a franchise) has established some ground rules to cover this sort of thing: if you’re black, you live; if you’re in a relationship with another character, you die; if you’re a useful tech-head, you die; if you’re an overly-idealistic researcher, you die. They mix it up a little here, but the Hollywood Morality Playbook fine-tunes the rest of the details. Interestingly, it’s clear by the end of the film that the story creators deliberately wanted only the female characters to survive the ordeal so, if you twig to this early on, you’ll be able to relax for the rest of the run-time. Seriously: even the female shark makes it to the end credits.

Most of the movie is well acted and nicely photographed and all the reasons that they make these types of films are summarily ticked off: good-looking actors in skimpy clothes with gorgeous scenery and pretty fish – checkity-check-check-check. My question is that none of the things that matter in the movie – all of the MacGuffins and the important equipment which will be useful later on – get flagged. Often, it’s unclear where we are, and why that’s important (it’s nowhere near as bad as the second “47 Metres Down” but it’s almost as annoying). The local restauranteur finds a big gnarly spear as the chips start to come down in the final act, but it serves no purpose during the climax – Chekov would’ve been screaming at the screen. Finally, the sharks are a bit naff. In the first “Deep Blue Sea”, the sharks were real: they were made from modified jet engines covered in latex shark suits; they were remote-controlled and they actually swam through the water, physically interacting with the actors. There were the occasional moments where you could see the rubber seams but, for the most part, they were incredibly effective. Here, all the fish are CGI and it’s bad. Fins that break the surface have this cute little flick and wriggle towards the tip that completely reads false and instantly destroys suspension of disbelief. The underwater scenes look cheap and nasty – like the kinds of modelling they used in “Sharknado”. “The Shallows” this ain’t. They should have just taken a leaf from Renny Harlin’s book and used real(ish) sharks.

So, that’s it – 550 posts and yet another shark flick. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I think that these films stem from dark and icky parts of the human psyche and are trading off the perceived threat that sharks pose to humans (minimal) and funding from the witchcraft that is Chinese medicine. In this year of Coronavirus lockdowns, I can almost see this film as a kind of public service announcement telling people to stay away from the beach and observe social distancing (or get eaten by a shark? Maybe not). Regardless, this is quite a dull stab at the genre, clunkily composed and about as realistic as its promotional poster (see above). That is to say, not at all.

Two Tentacled Horrors.