Before director Stephen Sommers was hired to resurrect The Mummy for Universal, he got the prime job of creating another big budget monster movie in the shape of Deep Rising. Merging the current trend (in 1998 that is) of disaster movies (Independence Day) and Ocean Liners (Titanic, er, also a disaster movie I suppose) it has a Han Solo style smuggler (a laconic and charming Treat Williams) and his crew transport a team of mercenaries (including Jason Flemyng, Djimon Hounsou, Wes Studi and Cliff Curtis) to a stricken passenger liner where they encounter Famke Janssen, amongst others. Soon the mercs mission is all but forgotten as the untrusting band fight to escape the giant, multi tentacled sea beast that has seized the ship.
While it's unlike Sommers to deliver a contemporary set film, this very much has his signature all over it. It's very glossy indeed, very silly and the horror elements are watered down in a daft, Tim Burton kind of way. There's relentless action, mostly staged around the diverse interior of the vessel, a script that goes beyond shallow and (as unfortunately expected from a Sommers film) some of the most cartoony and poorly rendered CGI since the last Stephen Sommers film you saw.
Deep Rising is dumb, but like The Mummy, only blandly so.
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