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Synopsis:
A small boat piloted by John Finnegan (Treat Williams) and crewed by
Joey Pantucci (Kevin J. O’Connor) and his girlfriend, Leila (Una
Damon), carries passengers towards an unidentified location in the
South China Sea. As Joey and Leila vigorously protest their working
conditions to an amused and unsympathetic Finnegan, Hanover (Wes
Studi) comes in to check that everything is on schedule. Finnegan
reassures him and, in response to Hanover’s probing of his motives,
explains simply that as long as he gets paid, he doesn’t care where
they are going, or why. Meanwhile, on the Argonautica, an
immense luxury liner on its maiden voyage, the ship’s designer and
owner Simon Canton (Anthony Heald) makes a triumphant speech to his
partying clientele, while professional thief Trillian St James (Famke
Janssen) picks the pocket of Captain Atherton (Derrick O’Connor).
Stepping outside to help herself to the Captain’s swipe card, and to
dispose of his wallet, Trillian hears a strange cry coming out of
the stormy darkness.... On Finnegan’s boat, tempers are beginning to
flare amongst the mysterious passengers. As they face off against
one another, Joey sneaks by into the area where their gear is
stored. To his horror, he finds torpedoes....and then the passengers
find him. Joey takes a savage beating until Finnegan
intervenes, first trying to talk their way out of the situation and
then, when that fails, jamming a weapon into the face of Mamooli
(Cliff Curtis). Vivo (Djimon Hounsou) instantly holds a knife to
Joey’s throat. The dangerous stand-off ends when, after a measured
look at Finnegan, Hanover orders his men to stand down, and Finnegan
hauls Joey away. On the Argonautica, Trillian has obtained
access to the ship’s vault and is helping herself to some jewellery
when she is caught by the Captain and Simon Canton and – for want of
a brig – locked up in the pantry. As Leila tends Joey’s injuries,
the frantic engineman tells Finnegan about the torpedoes; while
below, as Mulligan (Jason Flemyng) arms the torpedoes, Hanover
distributes assault weapons amongst his men. Meanwhile, someone has
disabled the Argonautica’s navigation and communication
systems. As Canton and the Captain react with incredulity, a sonar
operator detects something huge approaching the ship from the depths
of the ocean at tremendous speed. It strikes the liner, which comes
to a violent stop, throwing those on board every which way; many are
killed or injured. The survivors stampede in panic. One woman locks
herself into a bathroom, crying in fear....then hears something
moving deep within the ship’s infrastructure. An instant later, the
woman has simply vanished.... Finnegan looks on in disbelief as a
torpedo launcher is installed on his deck – and then, just too late,
sees that his radar has detected an unexpected object in the waters
ahead: a speedboat, knocked free from the Argonautica. The
two boats collide, and an explosion rips through Finnegan’s small
vessel. As Finnegan and Joey inspect the damage, Leila calls them up
to the bridge, pointing out to them a strange sight: a massive ocean
liner, sitting motionless on the dark, stormy seas....
Comments:
It occurs to me that Deep Rising is a pretty good metaphor
for the directorial career of Stephen Sommers. It starts off a bit
shaky; hits its stride to become, if not remotely original, at least
entertaining and exciting; and then overplays its hand, becoming
progressively bigger, louder and dumber – and finally insufferable.
As is so often the case, while its monster makes it nominally
science fiction, Deep Rising is really an action film in
disguise – or perhaps we should say, several action films in
disguise. There’s a film geek game I used to play when visiting my
favourite video store, sliding down the Horror or Science Fiction or
Cult aisle and going (only to myself: I’m not that much of a
dick) “Seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it, ooh haven’t,
seen it, seen it, seen it....” – or sometimes “Good, bad, blah, bad,
bad, blah, sucks, good monster, good, blah, really sucks....”
Deep Rising ultimately feels like Stephen Sommers’ version of
that game. He’s not so much making a movie here as bragging to his
fellow geeks about all the films he’s seen. “Aliens?
Seen it! The Abyss? Seen it! Terminator 2? Seen it!
Tremors? Seen it!”
But playing “Spot
The Reference” is only one of the ways in which you can watch
Deep Rising. You can also play Count The Cliché; or make
a mental list of every film you’ve seen in which these exact same
characters appear; or test your courage by enduring the script’s
attempts at humour. You can raise your eyebrows at the film’s body
count – and really, Deep Rising’s gore quotient is the one
truly surprising thing about it – or politely avert your eyes from
some of its less successful ventures into the realm of CGI effects.
Watching a film like Deep Rising is, in fact, rather like
eating at Macca’s: doing it all the time might be very, very bad for
you, but as a means of satisfying the occasional craving for junk,
it sure gets the job done.
Deep Rising
opens with a team of Extremely
Suspicious Characters being piloted in a small boat across the South
China Sea, destination unspecified, by one John Finnegan, hired for
his “reputation” and boasting the professional motto “If the cash is
there, we do not care”. The film and its problems thus begin almost
simultaneously, as we understand that we are expected to accept
Treat Williams in the role of a hard-nosed, bad-ass, unscrupulous
adventurer. Williams himself seems to battling disbelief at this
piece of casting, if the incredulous smirk that decorates his
pleasantly lived-in countenance for the entire film is anything to
go by. Never one to try anything that hasn’t been done before,
Stephen Sommers seems to be going for a Han Solo kind of vibe here:
heart of gold under cynical exterior, yada-yada. Trouble is, whereas
we could accept Han as the result of a career spent landing in one
pile of deep doo-doo while trying to extricate himself from another,
we’re never given any way of understanding Finnegan’s career choice:
he certainly wasn’t forced into it. We’re therefore left to
assume that he’s either (a) far stupider than he appears, or (b)
much more amoral than we’re subsequently given any reason to
believe. (Considering Finnegan’s aghast reaction upon discovering
that the Extremely Suspicious Characters are Up To No Good, my vote
is for (a).) Finnegan’s bad-ass-ism is, therefore, somewhat of an
Informed Attribute©, with which the script deals by
having Wes Studi’s Hanover, an obviously genuine bad-ass, treat
Finnegan with respect. Finnegan’s two person crew consists of Leila,
an all-purpose boat-hand whose lack of a surname indicates that she
is heading swiftly for a gruesome end (Una Damon is entirely wasted
in this throwaway supporting role), and Joey Pantucci, Finnegan’s
sidekick and engineer and (I’m sure you’ll be astonished to learn)
Deep Rising’s Odious Comic Relief. Opinions on Kevin J.
O’Connor’s performance here seem widely various. A lot of people
seem to find his Joey – gasp! shock! – funny. Others just
want to kill him. Personally, while conceding that Joey does have a
few amusing moments, most of the time I find his whininess
fingernails-on-blackboard annoying; so much so, that I am entirely
in sympathy with Hanover when he first tries to turn Joey into
monster bait, and then later on when, faced with the choice of a
quick death for himself, or of a slow, agonising death that takes
Joey out with him, he chooses the latter. However--- If the movies
teach us anything, it is that, no matter how hard you try, you
cannot kill the OCR; and Deep Rising’s late-stage
inference that it actually has is---well, it’s cruel, that’s all.
Films have no right to toy with their viewers’ emotions like
that.
Let's see: life with Joey Pantucci,
or....
So much for our
ostensible heroes. Stacked up against them are (I’m sure you’ll be
even more astonished to learn) the usual multi-national,
multi-cultural, multi-ethnic gathering of which, or so the movies
assure us, teams of professional mercenaries are always
comprised. (Why, oh, why can’t the rest of the world learn to get
along the way that criminals and gang-members do?) Our introduction
to this motley crew comes charmingly with a protracted shot of one
of them puking his guts from sea-sickness....and mercy on us if he
isn’t played by poor, dear
Trevor Goddard, may
he rest in peace. Not content with on-screen vomiting, Goddard
proceeds to embarrass himself even more by speaking in an
outrageously exaggerated ORRRR-STRAAAHHHL-YAN accent – which,
thankfully, he progressively tones down over the course of his
admittedly brief performance. (I always like to amuse myself by
picturing the horror of Hollywood casting agents when they find out
that we don’t actually sound like that. “But – but – ! You
can do that accent, right? Right??”) His stomach briefly
settling, Goddard – aka “T-Ray Jones” (!?) – is then
subjected to ridicule from his fellow mercenaries for coming from
ORR-STRAHL-YA in the first place. Ha, ha! Countries that aren’t
America are hilarious, aren’t they? (Considering that it’s
later implied that these guys have been working together for some
time, shouldn’t they have already gotten over their mutual cultural
differences?) A merciful interruption occurs when Joey sneaks into
the cargo area and discovers that the mercenaries are packing both
heavy weaponry and torpedoes (!!). He in turn is discovered himself,
and has the crap kicked out of him. Yay! In response to some angry
prodding from Leila (who is – ick! – Joey’s
girlfriend), Finnegan intervenes, and after a tense stand-off,
succeeds in rescuing his sidekick before any permanent damage can be
done to him. Boo!
Finnegan’s bad-ass
credentials thus established [*snicker*], it’s time to step
on board the Argonautica and meet our other two main
characters. (Well – three if you want to count Derrick O’Connor’s
Captain Atherton, but he makes a pretty early exit.) The first is
Simon Canton, designer and owner of the Argonautica – and
also (I’m sure you’ll be STILL MORE astonished to learn) the mole
who sabotaged the liner in the first place. (Canton is played by
Anthony Heald: you were expecting maybe honesty and
trustworthiness?) As Finnegan quickly deducts, Canton is in league
with Hanover and his team: they empty out the liner’s vault
and sink the boat with their torpedoes, he collects the
insurance. (How obliging of the monster, by the way, to stop the
communication-disabled Argonautica in the exact spot
in the South China Sea where Hanover et al. were supposed to
rendezvous with it. I wonder what they would have done if the liner
had come to a dead halt, say, fifty miles east?) Our final character
– using the term loosely – is professional thief Trillian St James
(I’m going to give the screenplay the benefit of the doubt here, and
assume that name is her nom de guerre, and that she’s really
called Esther Blodgett or something), who is recognised and
apprehended early on by Canton and the Captain and locked up in the
pantry, and who in this way survives the monster’s mass slaughter of
the liner’s passengers and crew. There’s really no need for Trillian
to be in this film at all, but while we’re dishing out all the other
Tokens, why should we pass up the Token Romantic Interest? Still – I
guess she’s not entirely useless, and also not annoying, which in a
film of this kind is probably the best we can hope for. And to give
credit where it’s due, Trillian does pass my patented
Heroine’s Intelligence Test, when she takes the first opportunity to
change from her sexy party dress and heels into some sensible
clothing – and yes, I am still glaring at you,
Penelope Ann Miller! (It is also
noticeable – and it must be very noticeable, because believe
me, this isn’t the kind of thing I usually notice – that despite
spending most of the film running around in cold water, Famke
Janssen never once, um, does a Jennifer Love Hewitt. I’d love to
know where she buys her bras.)
Catherine
wheels....flame-juggling....hundreds of drunken party-guests....
What could possibly go wrong?
So that’s our cast,
and before long they’re all wandering around the water-logged
corridors of the sinking ship, arguing, wise-cracking, and getting
picked off one by one roughly in the reverse order of their listing
in the credits. The only thing here that is in any way original is
the extreme nature of some of the gore scenes. Particularly
memorable is one in which a half-digested – and only half-dead –
mercenary spills out of a shot-open monster gut – which, come to
think of it, means we can add Anaconda
to the list of films Stephen Sommers saw before shooting Deep
Rising. (Discuss: the digested-but-still-living human being –
more or less stupid than the articulate severed head?) Otherwise,
the best I can say is that a few of the film’s gags are, believe it
or not, actually funny – the one universal reaction to Deep
Rising seems to be that everyone who watches it goes away
humming “The Girl From Ipanema” – and that a single glimmer of
originality shows itself in the fact that the mercenary who finally,
inevitably, cracks under pressure and turns into a sweaty, panicky
mess is played by the very white and very English Jason Flemyng
(last seen on this site dressed as Santa and getting stabbed to
death by an animatronic Chucky, and thus earning himself a place,
alongside Charles S. Dutton and Bridgette Wilson, on my list of
People Who Invariably Die In The Films I Watch). However, even these
very minor virtues are undermined by the fact that most of Deep
Rising’s dialogue is just awful, even by the unambitious
standards of the action movie. About half of it seems to consist of
variations on “What the hell was that?’ and “Let’s get the hell out
of here!”, the other of repetitions of Finnegan’s trademark action
hero utterance, “Now what?” (No, it’s not much of a
trademark; but then, he’s not much of an action hero.)
What do you mean, I'm next lowest
billed?
But then, not even
Stephen Sommers at his most delusional could ever imagine that
anyone would watch Deep Rising for its dialogue. They watch
it, I am sure, for the same reason that I do every time that
it’s on, complain about it afterwards as much as I might.
Because it has a
monster.
Naturally.
The best part of
Deep Rising comes early on, when the mercenaries, with Finnegan
and Joey in tow, make their way surreptitiously onto the
Argonautica. Grunting and snorting and waving their weapons and
generally stinking the place up with testosterone, the mercenaries
burst into the liner’s casino, intending to intimidate the
passengers into abject surrender....only to find it totally deserted
and a complete wreck. Understandably freaked out, the intruders go
hunting for an explanation, and slowly begin to realise that even if
the passengers are no longer on board the liner, something
is....
In truth, Deep
Rising’s monster is never more convincing that when it operates
as an unseen menace: as an unearthly noise, or something stirring
menacingly deep within the bowels of the ship. (And they even manage
to spoil this effective section of the film with one of my least
favourite effects, the series of floorboards that erupt due to
something underneath.) Even here, however, before we have any kind
of grasp on its true nature, the creature is maddeningly
inconsistent. Sometimes it pounces on its prey and gulps it down
lickety-split; sometimes – if the moment calls for it – it takes its
sweet time about the business; and sometimes it likes to, shall we
say, play with its food. We’re told that it “drinks” its victims,
yet it also seems to get a kick out of spray-painting its
surroundings with the very fluid it is presumably killing for. And
as with all movie monsters, there is no limit to its appetite: it
has disposed of 99.9% of the crew and customers of the
Argonautica, and yet still hunts down the newcomers with
undiminished gusto – until, that is, it meets up with John Finnegan,
who is granted the most outrageous Hero’s Death Battle Exemption©
since Robert Foxworth threw himself into the arms of a mutated bear
and started poking it with an arrow.
Aw, cool! Santa brought me a Treat
Williams doll!
The slow reveal of
Deep Rising’s monster is rather well done, but the
plain fact is, the more we see of the beastie, the less we can
believe in it – and besides, the critter suffers from a distracting
degree of over-familiarity. (I knew that thing was a Rob
Bottin without even reading the credits.) And not content with
showing us too much of its monster, Deep Rising goes on to
commit the crowning blunder of – trying to explain it! Still
more unbelievably, our explanation comes courtesy of Simon Canton,
who wipes his glasses, clears his throat, and reveals himself an
expert in cryptozoology by declaring the beastie to be “a strange
offshoot of the Archaea ottoia family.”
At least, that’s my
best guess: I’m working from an uncaptioned TV print here, so you’ll
have to cut me a little slack. But if that is what he says,
well, “strange” is putting it mildly.
Dredging up
memories from university days spent in classes on Invertebrate
Zoology and Microbiology – although obviously, my education in this
area was never as extensive as Simon Canton’s – I can tell you that
“Archaea” is the term for a group of prokaryotic organisms that are
sometimes known as “extremophiles” for their ability to exist under
hostile environmental conditions such as very high or low
temperature or salinity. (I’m not aware that it applies to their
ability to survive extremes of pressure, though, which presumably
was what they were trying to infer here.) Ottoia, on the
other hand, I had to look up....only to find that there was a pretty
good reason why I wasn’t familiar with it: it’s extinct. It
is, or rather was, a member of the phylum Priapulida; or –
for the benefit of those of you not up with the scientific habit of
disguising dirty jokes with Latin – penis worms.
So what Simon
Canton is telling us here is that the creature on the Argonautica
is a single-celled prehistoric burrow-dwelling wing-wang worm.
Yo.
No, actually, to be
fair, this is what Simon Canton is telling us: “At 4,000
feet, the Ottoia are about as long as a pencil, with bodies
about the size of a golf ball. But those at 20,000 feet have been
found to eat full-grown sharks. At 30 or 40,000 feet... Well, you do
the math.”
Ah, well. I guess
we always knew he was a bloody liar, right?
The early parts of
Deep Rising imply that there are swarms of worm-like monsters
on board the Argonautica. Frankly, that would have been more
interesting than the single creature that is finally revealed, which
turns out to be a cephalopod-like animal of gigantic size, capable
of surviving out of the water, unaffected by tremendous changes in
pressure, and with enormous eyes. Because if there’s one thing that
creatures that customarily lurk in “canyons deep enough to hide the
Himalayas” need, it’s eyeballs the size of the Times Square New
Year’s Eve Ball. And if you don’t think that something nasty is
going to happen to those eyeballs, well, you just haven’t watched
enough monster movies.
Hey, cool gun! Can I have a closer
look?
What we eventually
learn are the animal’s tentacles are, on their own, fast, deadly and
cunning (although when it comes to the tentacles “herding” the
surviving humans and locking the doors of the liner, I draw the
line: I don’t take that nonsense from
super-intelligent genetically-modified killer sharks, and I’m
certainly not going to take it from a giant penis worm!). The whole
animal, conversely, is as dumb as a box of rocks. Confronted by John
Finnegan, rather than just whipping out a tentacle and snapping him
in two or gulping him down, as has happened to every single other of
its victims, it winds a tentacle about his body and lifts him into
the air – and then uses another tentacle to slap him around!
(Granted, by this stage I felt like slapping Finnegan too, but....)
In doing so, it kindly leaves Finnegan’s arms free....and his gun
well within his grasp....
The something nasty
in question having happened to the creature’s eyeballs, the rest of
Deep Rising is spent on Finnegan and Trillion’s quest to
escape the sinking liner, and Simon Canton’s efforts to thwart them
and escape himself. This sequence is, even by action movie
standards, incredibly stupid.
(Sorry, I seem to
be using the phrase action movie standards rather too often
and too pejoratively, don’t I? Because heaven knows, no-one who
intentionally watches – and enjoys – as many bad horror and science
fiction films as I do has any right to be sitting in judgement on
any other genre. I’ll try again.)
This sequence is,
even by the standards of a Stephen Sommers film, groan-inducing,
interminable, and incredibly stupid. It is also the very first – but
by no means, by no means – the last time that Sommers will
reveal his deep personal philosophy to the film-going world: if you
can’t think what to do next, blow something up.
On the other hand,
the comeuppances dished out to Deep Rising’s two chief
villains are as poetic as even the most mean-spirited of us could
desire. So I guess I have to give the devil his due.
Well....I accept
that I’m probably going to draw some heat for my rough handling of
Deep Rising. A swift look around the internet reveals a
surprising amount of affection out there for this derivative piece
of work, and although I try to be understanding of other people’s
odd obsessions, this time they’ve got me beat. The only thing I can
come up with is – to return to my McDonald’s analogy – that films
like Deep Rising act like a kind of comfort food. You know
when you watch one that you’re going to get exactly what you got
every time before, no need to think, no nasty surprises.
Just don’t forget to keep the Tums handy.
All right, Mr Bottin, I'm ready for
my close-up
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Director:
Stephen Sommers