Plot recap in case your formative years were not, like mine, wasted in front of the TV: The Agonautica, the world’s most luxurious (and stupidly named) cruise ship, is celebrating its maiden voyage in the South Pacific. Rushing to intercept and rob it are a team of mercenaries lead by Hanover (an extremely growly Wes Studi) who have hired an unscrupulous rogue named Finnegan (a weirdly miscast Treat Williams) to get them there on his boat. They arrive to find the ship dead in the water and the majority of the passangers missing or dead. Turns out that the ship has been infested by giant carnivorous sea worms (oh noes!) and the mercenaries must team up with the survivors to battle their way to safety.
So I remembered this movie being silly but also kind of badass as a kid. Turns out, it's mostly just silly. The quote at the top of the review isn't actually from the film, but the tagline, which gives you a pretty clear indication of how this thing was marketed. It doesn't really surprise me that this movie was dumped in January and was pretty much forgotten by everyone but me, since it manages to fail pretty hilariously as an action movie, a horror movie and pretty much everything else. Allow me to explain.
So Deep Rising follows the tried and true formula of sending a bunch of people (generally badass dudes) on a mission and then have something scary start killing them one at a time. Predator, Aliens, Pitch Black...there's a long and storied history here. The premise of Deep Rising is a decent enough set-up for something like this, but the biggest (of several) failure that sets it apart from the classics I just mentioned is its character-building (or lack thereof). See, in Predator and Aliens, the films establish a sense of camraderie between the soliders before the shit hits the fan. You are shown upfront how they work together, how well they know each other, who's close with who, etc. By the time the monsters show up, you feel like you're one of the team and each loss hurts you accordingly. Deep Rising shoots for this, but doesn't quite get there. The mercenaries (aside from being very ethnically diverse, to a degree that almost makes it seem PC) are all stock tough guys who display no real emotions toward each other beyond the usual uber-masculine bullshit. Yet later, when the Austrailian guy bites it, the Irish guy laments that he was his best friend. And this was signified by...what? Them high-fiving earlier? No. I'm going to need a bit more than that to give a shit.
Now, of course Predator and Aliens are famously chockful of uber-masculine bullshit, but even the most ludicrous examples of this can be entertaining, dare I say even moving, if carried well by the writing and the acting. As you can probably guess, that is not the case here. Disregarding the fact that the dialogue in the film is derivative and unconvincing, the audience is never given any demostration that these guys are anything other than dumbasses with guns and/or cannon fodder for the monsters. The film shows them emptying their guns into inanimate objects that fall over during a tense scene, running away and not even attempting to formulate any kind of strategy beyond "Get the fuck off the ship". In Aliens and Predator, the soldiers are portrayed as competant professionals who have been forced into an extreme situation which, along with their pre-established and convincing inter-relationships, allows you to sympathize with and worry about them. None of this is helped by the actors, most of whom don't look all that tough to begin with and who end up just coming off as a bunch of chumps that I don't really give a shit about.
The three non-mercenary leads in the film fare slightly better, but I still had some issues. Leading the cast as Finnegan, the Han Solo-ish pilot, is Treat Williams, who is a little too old to be playing the role, but effectively plays the whole, burnt-out, "I'm too old for this shit" character through out the film. Playing the obligatory female lead is the insanely beautiful Famke Janssen as the ludicrously named Trillian St. James, a pickpocket working the ship. Kevin J. O'Conner (who I remember best as the weasely Benny from Stephen Sommers first Mummy film and who I kind of wish was in more stuff) is Joey, Finnegan's engineer/gear-head sidekick and all-around comic relief. Both Williams and Janssen seem to be aware that the entire enterprise of this film is silly and act accordingly, playing their roles with fairly broad action movie bravado/humor. The Joey character is only made bearable by O'Conner's nerdy, put-upon performance; most of the gags in the film fall pretty flat, coming off as more awkward than funny.
As far as the action itself, the movie is passable, but nothing to write home about. The film's complete reliance on CGI in a pre-Lord of the Rings world makes for some pretty fake looking monsters and allows a great deal of appreciation for how much more believable practical effects can be in films like this (Tremors is on deck for review soon and, in addition to being very similar to this film conceptually, makes a wonderful case for the disgust and tactial sensation that practical effects can generate). There was one pretty convincing/nasty scene that I like which blurs the line between practical and computer effects. Gross, right? In addition to quite a few jump scares and the like, the film cribs pretty shamelessly from films that have come before. Comparisons to Tremors nonwithstanding, one of the sequences in the second act, in which the characters have to swim one at a time through a submerged part of the ship, looks like it was compiled from footage of a similar sequence that occurs about halfway through Alien Resurrection, right down to the sickly green lighting. The fact that Deep Rising came out a short two months after Alien Resurrection can't have done it any favors. Most notable is the final action sequence which, despite being completely improbable and looking like it belongs in a video game, is still quite a bit of fun.
All in all, I'd say Deep Rising is mostly a piece of crap, but it's got some pretty good nostalgia value. Well, it does in my case. And I think that fifty years from now, stoned college kids will probably watch it in the same way that I would watch...I don't know...The Creature From The Haunted Sea.
Iron Man 2 is up next! I am so behind.
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