Reviews

Films

Deep Blue Sea

Directed by Renny Harlin, starring Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows

Sharks are economic villains because they don't need motives - all they do is swim and eat, right? They weren't abused as children or tormented by colleagues or twisted by religion, they just want grub and they don't care if it has gills or legs. Jaws got this and so does Deep Blue Sea, but unlike Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, this Renny Harlin-directed thriller doesn't want to mythologize its underwater monsters; it wants to have fun with them. An unadulterated b-grade hoot, this is a film so deliberately silly that you can't help but get swept up in it.

A scientist (Saffron Burrows) has 48 hours to prove to the pharmaceuticals company which she works for that an experimental floating laboratory, where she is using sharks to conjure up a cure for Alzheimer's, should be kept open. The sharks' brains have been swollen to increase the amount of protein, which would then be extracted and used to treat patients. Problem is, it's also made the sharks smarter and when a giant storm hits the facility, the big fish strike back at their captors, hunting them down one by one.

Brilliant huh? Super smart sharks! And it's not as if their intelligence has made the beasts emotionally complex, it just makes them more clever when it comes to killing. A plot this ridiculous takes courage to bring to the screen and thankfully Harlin is aware of how over-the-top it is. He treats it accordingly, maintaining a breakneck pace and serving up one breathless action sequence after another. The characters are all wafer thin although some die in the most unpredictable fashion, which keeps you guessing as to who'll be torn apart next.

Ben Davey

Don't Say a Word

Directed by Gary Fleder, starring Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy

Again trusted with a role of the upper-middle-class guy who's suddenly knee-deep in doodoo, Michael Douglas overacts in a desperate effort to make the audience care about his character's plight. Don't Say a Word, directed by Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls), is a busy movie that lays on contrivance way too thick and then injects savage violence for impact. Mistaking a convoluted plot for cleverness and sensationalism for emotional authenticity, this is more a flurry of hands trying to stitch loose threads together than a rich tapestry.

Psychologist Nathan Conrad (Douglas) is on a deadline. He has until the end of the day to elicit details from a troubled young woman (Brittany Murphy) concerning a stolen jewel. At stake are Nathan's wife and young daughter who are being held captive by a gang of goons led by the malevolent thief Patrick Koster (Sean Bean). And so while Nathan tries his darndest to decipher the psych-patient's ramblings, the wife and child try to outwit their captors and a suspicious detective begins piecing the clues together in order to prevent the possible bloodbath.

You can see the contents of a decent nail-biter squeezed in among the detritus here. Psychological game-play with a loopy temptress? Fair enough. Family being held hostage? Sure, why not. But then the filmmakers go for broke and serve up implausibility in an attempt to keep the pace manic. It's as if they're frightened that the audience may get bored with a story stripped back to its bare nuts and bolts and so distractions are added to heighten confusion. As a result, the cast either screams or emotes gratuitously and the exercise degenerates into sheer overkill.

BD

(China Daily 10/09/2007 page20)