Deep Blue Sea

"Your deepest fear is about to come true" the posters warned, and I had a horrible feeling their prediction would transpire to be all too accurate.

I can't say I was looking forward to Deep Blue Sea with a whole load of enthusiasm. I never had much time for disaster flicks in the first place, and the standard of the genre has plummeted so dramatically this decade that I made sure to bring a valium-packed lunch. Much to my astonishment, the film turned out to be almost bearable: awful, yes, but not quite as monumentally dire as I'd anticipated.

For all intents and purposes, the film might as well be a '90s remake of Jaws, but it at least has the honesty to tacitly acknowledge as much during a couple of in-jokey scenes. Its unambitious plot pitches a team of scientists together in an attempt to discover the cure for Alzheimer's disease: true to genre form, the gang's leader (Saffron Burrows) then has a brainwave of monumental stupidity. Isolate degenerate human brain cells, inject them into sharks' brains, and that'll do the trick, surely?

Of course, the plan backfires horrendously, the sharks develop human intelligence and expand to king-size proportions, while the hapless boffins take it in turns to get munched alive.

It's all quite amusing in a B-movie sort of way, but it's truly, dreadfully bad, and the dialogue defies criticism or description - if they ever publish the script, I might even buy it for the goof. Deep Blue Sea isn't likely to bag any Oscars for the quality of its acting, either. L.L. Cool J's handful of comic scenes are painfully unfunny - his idea of comedy seems to have been entirely shaped by such seminal innovators as Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy - and Saffron Burrows elevates the art-form of bad acting to previously unscaled peaks. On the other hand, Samuel L. Jackson has a whale of a time getting his teeth stuck into the abysmal script, and the computer-generated sharks look almost as impressive as the budget entitles us to expect.

To be totally honest, the film only has one saving grace: its transparent awareness of its own stupidity. This doesn't render the film any less awful, but it makes forgiveness a good deal easier.

There are even three or four genuinely breathtaking set-piece scenes - all of them extremely violent - and if you whittled Deep Blue Sea down to a five-minute highlight film, it would seem almost brilliant. That said, if I had to use any of the quotes herein for the film's publicity campaign, I couldn't look beyond 'degenerative human brain cells'.