It’s a well-known fact that people love movies about shark attacks. They don’t necessarily have to be great, and very few of them are outside of Steven Spielberg’s all-time classic Jaws, but there’s just something so entertaining about watching a cast of cannon fodder being fed to the briny deep’s most dangerous predators that we’re going to keep seeing various spins on the same setup forever.
If you can’t wait long enough to see Sylvester Stallone’s King Shark devour his enemies and snap them clean in two as part of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, then the good news is that one of the most beloved shark thrillers in history has just been added to the Netflix library, where it demands to be enjoyed on either a Friday night or lazy weekend.
From the very beginning, Deep Blue Sea had B-movie glory written all over it. With a $70 million budget, genre journeyman Renny Harlin behind the camera and a high concept premise that saw genetically altered super-intelligent sharks turn on the humans who captured and performed all sorts of experiments on them, a good time was virtually guaranteed to be had.
Saffron Burrows and Thomas Jane are technically the leads, but the movie belongs to Samuel L. Jackson, who knows exactly what he’s starring in, and pitches his performance as such. The actor gets one of his signature lengthy monologues for good measure, which results in Deep Blue Sea‘s standout moment by a mile, even if the CGI is pretty awful when viewed through a modern lens.
Deep Blue Sea pulled in $165 million at the box office and spawned to direct-to-video sequels nobody gave a sh*t about, but it’s one worth adding to your Netflix watch-list immediately.
