Just your standard, run-of-the-mill “abnormally intelligent sharks attacking a science float during a hurricane” story. Early on, we get a little plot filler about how the dorsal-finned apex predators have a special syrup in their brains that can cure Alzheimer's and that’s why man has bred a new mutant variety with a larger cranium, some such nonsense, but nobody really cares. We’re just here to see sharks scare people and eat people and act like huge jerks while they’re scaring and eating people.

The scene everyone remembers is Samuel L. Jackson’s interrupted motivational speech at the end of the second act, and that’s still every bit as startling, ballsy and amazing as it was the first time I saw it. The rest of the film can be easily classified as another bad, if ambitiously inventive, dose of effects-driven monster trash. As this was released in 1999, the computer graphics are omnipresent and ineffective, but it does merit some credit for tossing the poor, dwindling cluster of survivors into such a long string of original, entertaining traps and tangles. Even if they are universally doomed to suffer a ghastly dismemberment or two (or eleven) along the way. And hey, LL Cool J is here!

_Deep Blue Sea_ isn’t boring, I’ll say that. It’s stupid, sometimes incredibly so, and any moment it spends away from the frothy red water is a waste of time, but the big set pieces are appropriately frequent and loud and bombastic and, again, that Jackson speech is almost worth the price of admission by itself. I’ve sat through a whole lot worse.