The Deep

Directed by Peter Yates, The Deep follows a vacationing couple (Nick Nolte’s David and Jacqueline Bisset’s Gail) as they stumble upon a WWII-era shipwreck rife with valuables during a routine dive – with the pair eventually soliciting help from a local (Robert Shaw’s Romer) to bring their find to the surface. Filmmaker Yates, armed with a script by Peter Benchley and Tracy Keenan Wynn, kicks The Deep off with a fairly tedious diving sequence that’s ultimately indicative of the picture’s less-than-enthralling sensibilities, as the movie, which generally progresses at a glacial pace, contains exceedingly little in the way of attention-grabbing, wholeheartedly compelling attributes and elements – with the arms-length atmosphere exacerbated by a continuing emphasis on underwater sequences that are rarely, if ever, as enthralling as Yates has obviously intended. And although the film admittedly does possess a small handful of genuinely exciting episodes, including (and especially) a lumbering, brutal hand-to-hand fight between a pair of hired goons, The Deep builds towards a prolonged and mostly tiresome climactic stretch that ensures it concludes on about as underwhelming a note as one could possibly envision – with the end result a potentially-stirring thriller that should’ve topped out at around an hour and a half (ie 124 minutes is just absurd, in the final analysis).

** out of ****

Leave a comment