Year: 1998
Runtime: 106 min
Director: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Treat Williams, Famke Jannsen, Kevin J. O’Connor, Wes Studi, Anthony Heald, Derrick O’Connor
I harbor a primordial fear of the ocean. I mean it. I am genuinely terrified of the lurking depths where man cannot tread and where things live that were never meant to see the light of day. Heck, a good story about sea monsters and the like will give me shivers even if it isn’t plausible in any scientific manner. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand how badly Deep Rising failed at its one job—which was to make me jump even once at its watery shenanigans.
I mean, you could make me stare at a fishbowl for an hour while listening to the Jaws theme and it would have been scarier than this movie.
And part of the annoying rub is that I’m still not sure how much of this movie was supposed to be a horror film.
Director Stephen Sommers doesn’t really seem to know what sort of movie he was making. Is it a gory horror flick? A big budget action/adventure? A classic creature feature like Roger Corman would have developed back in the 50s? In the end, it’s a weird mishmash of genres and ideas, none of it coalescing into a perfect salad.
The plot finds our smuggler/hero, Finnegan, played by the always awesome Treat Williams, guiding a band of mercenaries into the South China Sea. He took the money but didn’t want the details on the job. He would definitely regret that decision when his engineer discovers crates of guns and torpedoes aboard.
Seems like these mercs, lead by the commanding Wes Studi, have plans to seize a fancy ocean liner and loot its incredibly wealthy guests. I mean, sure, it beats working at McDonalds, but if this were just Die Hard on a boat (for the umpteenth time) it wouldn’t be very noteworthy, now would it?
See, something else has already gotten to the cruise ship. Something slimy, tentacle-y, and very, very hungry.
Soon our characters, good guys and bad guys alike, are trying to fight off a common threat and escape with their lives.
On paper, this sounds like fun. In reality…it’s still sorta fun, but far from perfect.
At first glance, I really did think this was going to be a typical horror movie. Like Alien, only not as clever. When our gang of motley thieves first descend onto the cruise ship, blissfully unaware of the gruesome surprise inside, we get a lot of slow camera pans around the deserted ship. Gruff mercenaries walk cautiously down dark corridors with their rifles aimed at the camera. All the usual monster-movie tropes. And for a while I figured that was going to be the theme of the movie; a survival horror type film that saw these one-dimensional dudes get chomped from the shadows.
But then we see the monster, in all its late 1990s glory, and the movie goes from Alien to Aliens, with a lot of yelling, running, and gunning. Things go boom, people get muched, all with a lot of exciting music by the talented Jerry Goldsmith.
None of this is bad, but the movie fails to deliver any interesting characters and never really conveys a sense of danger. Sure, people die, but it never feels like the stakes are that high. This is mostly due to the script calling for quippy one-liners in place of genuine dialog. It’s hard to feel like there are life-and-death stakes when characters are mostly cracking jokes about the spiny, tentacled monster picking them off one-by-one.
It doesn’t help that this movie about a giant sea monster eating an entire cruise ship full of people is surprisingly timid when it comes to gore. The movie’s goriest moment is a scene wherein our ostensible heroes stumble into a hallway filled with the gooey remains of the monster’s lunch. It’s actually a pretty good scene for the ick factor, challenged only by a scene in which one of the mercs is regurgitated in mostly-digested form, but if you wanted a nasty little gore flick, this won’t quite live up to expectations.
Stephen Sommers seems at crossroads here, never descending into actual horror and not playing it more campy, like Army of Darkness (or his later gem The Mummy). Fortunately, through the horror is weak, the action scenes are pretty fun, including a speedboat chase in the bowels of the sinking cruise ship. Every so often we get a flash of the kind of brilliance the movie should have been and it keeps us from completely dismissing this as a flop.
And the cast seems to be having fun. Treat Williams hams up every scene he’s in and he spars nicely with Kevin J. O’Conner and Wes Studi. Most of the mercenaries are made up of prime character actors who embody their limited roles with at least one memorable personality trait before they become seafood. Only Famke Jannsen stands out as a little awkward; she’s supposed to be an international thief who got caught robbing the ship and survived the ensuring massacre, but she’s basically just eye candy and a very shoehorned in love interest for Williams.
I mean, she does the best she can with the material, but her character ain’t exactly Ellen Ripley.
And this sea beastie ain’t exactly an H.R. Gieger creation. Supposedly designed by Rob Bottin, master of all things freaky from movies like The Thing, the monster in Deep Rising is…well, it’s pretty disappointing. It’s a muddy swarm of CGI tentacles that would look right at home in a bad video game. There is nothing frightening or impressive about this creature.
I know that CG effects become dated fast, but I just find it hard to imagine that these blurry, brown streaks of violence were considered cutting edge at the time. And the movie’s climatic reveal of the creature’s big ugly mug comes off as something so profoundly bland that it wouldn’t be allowed in a direct-to-TV movie. The iconic reveal of such classic movie monsters like the Xenomorph or Predator is clearly meant to be evoked, but this is just a big old pile of meh.
If those two baddies are classic monsters, like Pepsi or Coke, then this fugly sea monster is like lukewarm Mr. Pibb.
So with all this criticism, is Deep Rising a bad movie? No. But it doesn’t stand up as a classic of any genre. Fans of Treat Williams will probably get a kick out of seeing him acting as cool as Steve McQueen against overwhelming odds, but horror movie buffs and monster fanatics will probably be disappointed in the rest of the movie.
