Deep Blue Sea 2 is not a sequel to Deep Blue Sea. It is in fact a remake. A low budget, low effort, low quality remake. It’s almost identical minus the budget, the plot, the parrot and the actors. Don’t let that number two in the title fool you. It’s a mere ploy. It’s like comparing Fright Night (2011) with Fright Night 2 (2014). As in, they are the same film, just slightly different.
So, the plot is near enough the same as the one we got in 1999. Some intelligent sharks rampage through an underwater facility, killing the pesky humans that get in their way. It doesn’t help that the epic facility in the middle of the ocean looks, from the surface, like a shed has been dropped onto it. Why are these people in the middle of the ocean with genetically modified sharks anyway? Because a guy called Durant wants to use said genetically modified sharks to prevent an Artificial Intelligence-led apocalypse. Right, okay then…
It doesn’t help that Durant is on drugs. No wonder he’s worried about an AI apocalypse, he’s probably spending most of his waking hours off his face on whatever cocktail he’s pumping into his body. It does give us moments where he has a Rain Man/A Beautiful Mind flash, with formulae et al appearing on the screen. Honestly, they were some of the least annoying parts.
There are efforts to riff on popular moments from the original film. This breaks up the monotony elsewhere. Most of the run time is as padded as the lead actress’s brassiere. Who, it has to be said, exists solely to be angry at other people and run around in tops that are a size too small. Those same tops are also unzipped or unbuttoned to almost comical depths.
Then there is Trent, a cut price Thomas Jayne replacement. The character leaves almost no mark and now, a few days after watching it, he has left no impression on me whatsoever. What I can recall is that he is another key component in the angry acting school that the producers of this movie were apparently casting for.
Events take an unexpected turn for the hilarious when the baby sharks arrive. No doubt inspired by a need to save on the CGI budget, they appear as threatening as a stern look from an elderly librarian. Those baby sharks attack the cast in corridors that all look the same, but have different coloured lighting. See, it can’t be the same set used repeatedly! Look, this one is yellow! And this corridor is blue! Trust us, they are totally different locations!
The positives, as brief as they are, include the pre-credits sequence (quite nicely shot), and the bait-switch (pun intended) that hearkens back to Samuel L Jackson’s ill-fated role in Deep Blue Sea. And that really is it. There is literally nothing else I can recommend besides maybe switching the film off.
Save yourself the time and effort. If you have a choice between watching Deep Blue Sea 1 and 2, or just watching Deep Blue Sea twice, do the latter. You will be missing out on literally nothing.
