My Review of Deep Rising (1998)

I went ahead and made Deep Rising (1998) the finale to my underwater marathon.

Released in '98 rather than '89, Deep Rising is a fun, dumb, summer schlockbuster.

This movie has a pretty stellar cast. Treat Williams, who I will always love for playing Berger in the Hair film adaptation, plays Finnegan, a hopelessly trusting mercenary boat captain of some sort, who lives by the motto "If the cash is there, we do not care," a credo that immediately lands him in hot water as he takes on a crew of heavily armed criminals without even asking where they are going. Finnegan's ship is crewed by Joey the engineer (Kevin J O'Conner, Beni from The Mummy (1999)), and Leila (Una Damon) who dies so early and unceremoniously that I was sure it was a fake-out all the way until the credits rolled. The fabulous Wes Studi plays Hanover, the leader of the thieves, and his gang includes some great character actors, particularly Jason Flemyng and Djimon Hounsou. Simultaneously with Hanover's heist, cat burglar Trillian (Famke Janssen) is also attempting to rob the floating casino that serves as the location for most of the movie. Anthony Heald rounds out the main cast as the loathsome capitalist behind the Argonautica cruise ship, Simon Canton.

The dialogue is truly terrible, but in a way that wraps around to being fun again. Everyone speaks exclusively in cliches, and the first few minutes include three different characters angrily shouting "X, my ass!" in a way that lets you know the screenwriters thought they were really doing something. The little moments between characters are frequently funny, even if no line of dialogue ever feels like it was delivered by an actual human being. I think my favorite moment is a one such quiet exchange between Finnegan and Joey; "Whatcha got there? Peanut. Peanut? Peanut."

The basic plot is that Hanover's crew have hired Finnegan to get them to an undisclosed location along with a cargo that turns out to be a bunch of torpedoes. They plan to rob the vault of the Argonautica and then scuttle the ship. Canton, the businessman, serves as their man on the inside, hoping to cash in on the insurance policy for the boat to bail him out of his poor financial decisions. These schemes are interrupted by the presence of giant, tentacled worm monsters from the deep. They aren't mutants, or aliens, or prehistoric crustaceans this time, just a nasty beastie that apparently lives in the area, according to the opening text dump. The creatures quickly consume nearly everyone aboard and our heroes have to make their way around the stricken vessel, avoiding the monsters and searching for the loot.

Treat Williams looks and acts bizarrely like Lonestar from SpaceBalls in this movie, but everyone else is so ridiculous that it doesn't stand out as an oddity. Famke Janssen is gorgeous and fun, while Hanover's crew all chew the scenery like mad dogs. Joey was the standout character for me though. He plays the long-suffering-nerd archetype, and does it well, although it really bothers me that his relationship with Leila is made use of in a scene exactly twice before she is killed, and he spends the whole movie not knowing that she's dead, until the end, and then he goes right back to wisecracking after a moment of emotion. The writers clearly did not have a strong direction for his character, so he ends up as the repository for all the comic relief jokes that didn't fit anyone else. The fact that Kevin J O'Conner is genuinely super funny turns the role from one that could have been incredibly abrasive into a solid comic sidekick.

The CGI for the monster is very inconsistent. There are a couple of shots that look very good, especially for 1998, and then there are plenty that look just bad, even for 1998. It was a very ambitious creature design, and I feel that it mostly works, but I will always dock points for CGI creatures where they could have been done more effectively with practical effects, and I do feel that is the case here. The limited locations in the film meant that they could have spent the time putting in place some really good looking animatronics and puppets, but they went 100% digital all the way. The explosions in this are also just terrible, copy-pasted stock effects. I should probably also mention the stupid guns Hanover's crew use. They have rotating-barrel assault rifles, like little mini-miniguns, apparently the cutting edge hardware in China. There are just so many problems with them, but the question that hangs over it all is why someone thought that this movie about CGI tooth-worms needed a fictional firearm in the first place. The prop designer must have been the director's nephew or something.

I had a blast watching this one, but it is truly trash-cinema. I'll give it 3/5, and that's probably too generous.