Deep Rising

Deep Rising

It's Friday night, I turn on the television and see a film starting. I start watching without knowing the name or the story. Great, I think. Twenty minutes in I was starting to get annoyed because I still didn't know what the film was called. Then, I start to get an inkling that it was Deep Rising. How? I hear you cry. Crap direction and god damn awful special effects that would be better off on a spectrum. That's how.

The first Stephen Sommers film I ever saw was The Mummy. I enjoyed it, cheesy one liners, average acting, good set pieces and pretty good CGI. It reminded me of Indianna Jones and Romancing the stone. Then came the sequel, cheesy one liners, average acting and one of the worst displays of CGI ever and a storyline fit for the bin. Recently, I caught Van Helsing. Another film by Sommers, with a similar theme! The answer seems to be that if the story is suffering, whack some CGI in and everything will be ok. The problem is, if your CGI looks like a pile of garbage, then nobody's going to get excited. No one is going to believe in the film, and the rest of it suffers accordingly.

Deep Rising is without a doubt, AWFUL. The acting is dreadful. Every Single stereotypical character that is normally present in a action/monster/horror film is here, the normal guy who manages to kick ass, the female love interest and a untrustworthy rich man! The actors aren't A-list and the film looks like it could of been made for channel 5.

Treat Williams (WHO?) takes the lead as John Finnegan. A man who is forced to join a gang of hi-jackers trying to take over a luxury cruise ship. Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and The league of extraodinary gentlemen) appears as one of the henchmen, as does Wes Studi (Sagat from Street fighter:the movie). As I said A-list this aint! The only real recognizable actor is Famke Janssen (Goldeneye and X-men) who stars as Trillian St. James. The cruise liner is deserted and there are no bodies anywhere. It's not long before the motley crew discover the cause. A giant squid like monster that swallows you whole and dissolves your body in acid while your still alive.

My immediate reaction to this was RIPOFF! One horrible and probably the only decent part of the movie sees one the crew shot from the inside of the squids tentacles after being half-dissolved. This is straight from Aliens and by now I'd really had enough. So when, Anthony held (Hannibal Lektor's dinner from the end of Silence of the lambs) turned up as the untrustworthy rich man, I had already guessed the entire storyline of the film. A 4 year old could follow what was going to happen next!

I very rarely stop watching a film part of the way through. Deep Rising only managed to escape this because I didn't know what it was called. Please for the love of god, only watch this film if you want to see how bad it is. If you want to enjoy yourself, you'd be better of watching the late Friday film on channel 5.