|
|
|
| DEEP BLUE SEA (1999) - PG-13
|
|  |
|
ReviewScore: 54 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
View Credits | See Other Reviews
| |
The critics may have done their best to sink the latest horror saga Deep Blue Sea, but all indications are that the film itself will generate any sinking that occurs at the box office this weekend. Since it opened on Wednesday, it has been doing more business than any other release. Critics, by and large, have been somewhat kinder to it than the flood of other scary movies of late (with the exception of the gushingly praised, mini-budgeted Blair Witch Project, which opens wide today and could very well wind up demolishing the competition). Most of the critics seem to agree that what the movie is not is original. Writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Imagine a cut-rate Titanic (Deep Blue Sea is filled with scenes of flooding corridors) stripped of romance and historical resonance and fused with Jaws, shorn of mythic symbolism and without complex characters, and you have the essence of this live-action horror comic." Still, Holden concedes, "in its dumb, bludgeoning way, it's fun." Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today offers perhaps the funniest critical assessment. She writes that it "is to Jaws what frozen fish sticks are to Chilean sea bass." Runner-up for humorous zingers: Hannah Brown in the New York Post, who writes, "For those people who wait all year for "Shark Week" to play on the Discovery Channel, it's a must-see." Still, the film does receive a number of strong reviews, among them, Roger Ebert's in the Chicago Sun Times: "The movie is essentially one well-done action sequence after another," he comments. Says Mike LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, "This is one of the few big-fish horror films that still has the power to surprise." And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal seems to fancy the movie even more than Jaws. "This impressive film," he writes, "is closer to the Frankenstein myth than the Benchley legend; it deals with sharks' brains just as much as their dentition." |
|
|
|
