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Movie Review

Deep Rising (1998)

January 30, 1998

FILM REVIEW; A Luxury Ship, a Greedy Owner and Slimy Monsters

Published: January 30, 1998

''Titanic'' isn't the only sinker in town.

Now there's ''Deep Rising,'' a ridiculous but energetic movie centered on a luxurious cruise ship and assorted lowlifes, including tentacled monsters that rise, huge and slimy, from canyons beneath the South China Sea and leave their human prey sucked meatless into bloody skeletons.

This is the movie with credits for ''half-digested Billy,'' ''the toilet lady'' and a wallful of Playboy photos.

To deal with ''Deep Rising'' on its loftiest plane, it is an action film built around barratry, a word not likely to be found in the vocabularies of any of its characters, who are given mainly to the more accessible obscenities.

The plot goes like this: On the maiden voyage of the Argonautica, a vessel so luxurious that it cost $487.6 million, or about four times as much as the Titanic in current dollars, the seemingly hospitable owner has arranged with his captain and a diverse gang of mercenaries to sink the vessel for its insurance money, because no matter how popular it is, this ship of sybarites can never recoup its cost.

So, on a dark and stormy night, the hirelings are speeding toward their target aboard a scruffy patrol boat chartered for the occasion from John F. Finnegan (Treat Williams), whose rule for the quality of his employers is: ''If the cash is there, we don't care.''

But when the pirates board the ship, which has been disabled by a confederate, they find no signs of life and plenty of indications of death. Pretty soon, the question for Finnegan, his crew, the mercenaries, their employer and a good-looking female passenger named Trillian (Famke Janssen), a thief who survived the carnage, is not so much how to sink the Argonautica. It is how to salvage their lives from the groaning monsters who have turned the place into an abattoir.

''Deep Rising'' rapidly becomes one of those which-way-shall-we-flee horror movies as one by one, various characters are suddenly set upon by enormous coils that end in voracious toothy maws.

Minor characters succumb first; others survive, if only momentarily, cursing, firing their Chinese-made Gatling guns and sending bloody monster flesh flying and turning the rising waters red aboard the glub boat.

Stephen Sommers, who wrote and directed ''Deep Rising,'' keeps the proceedings moving along briskly if predictably; the actors, including Anthony Heald as the evil ship owner, Canton, and Wes Studi as Hanover, the leader of the mercenaries, carry on as expected in such films. Ms. Janssen brightens the proceedings considerably, and Kevin J. O'Connor, as Finnegan's kindhearted engineer, Pantucci, provides the film's most sympathetic character and generates welcome laughter.

''Deep Rising'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Besides the vomit, the screaming half-eaten man and the woman pulled to her doom through a toilet, there are the bloody skeletons, the floating corpse, the slimy monsters, the dripping bodily fluids, the shootings, the violent threats and oh, some impolite language.


Written and directed by Stephen Sommers; director of photography, Howard Atherton; edited by Bob Ducsay and John Wright; music by Jerry Goldsmith; production designer, Holger Gross; produced by Laurence Mark and John Baldecchi; released by Hollywood Pictures. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Treat Williams (Finnegan), Famke Janssen (Trillian), Anthony Heald (Canton), Kevin J. O'Connor (Pantucci) and Wes Studi (Hanover).

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