Shark Week 4: 'Deep Blue Sea 2' (2018)

The original Deep Blue Sea has become something of a cult classic, skirting the line between campy and clever, and it remains one of my favorite silly shark movies (as well as one of the highlights of director Renny Harlin's uneven body of work). I guess it's built up enough of a following to be worth a cheap brand extension, in the form of this straight-to-video "sequel" that is more like a bargain-basement remake. None of the characters or storylines carry over from the previous movie, and instead Deep Blue Sea 2 mostly rehashes the ideas from its predecessor, only in a cheaper, less engaging form.

Once again, the action takes place at a remote research facility in the middle of the ocean, in this case off the coast of South Africa, where scientists are doing top-secret research using sharks as test subjects. Here, billionaire pharmaceutical titan Carl Durant (Michael Beach) is using bull sharks (instead of mako sharks as in the original) to develop a drug that will unlock the potential of the human brain (this is the latest movie to trot out the tired fallacy about humans only using 10 percent of their brains). Why does he need to develop this drug? To prepare humans for the coming war against super-intelligent machines, of course! Sadly, this bizarre motivation only gets explored in a few lines of dialogue, although Beach gives the movie's best performance by completely committing to Durant's megalomania.

In his effort to defeat super-intelligent machines, Durant has instead created super-intelligent sharks, which, uh, doesn't seem like a very good trade-off. These sharks are so smart that at one point there is a scene of a shark eavesdropping on the human characters' conversation through a porthole! Of course, the sharks get loose on the day that Durant has invited absurdly named shark conservationist Dr. Misty Calhoun (Danielle Savre) and a couple of other disposable scientists to visit the lab, and Misty has to use all her shark-conserving skills (and team up with a hunky former Navy SEAL) to get herself and the rest of the crew out of the isolated lab alive. (Spoiler alert: Most of them do not make it.)

Director Darin Scott (whose credits include a Lifetime movie called Megachurch Murder and a direct-to-video sequel to House Party) and the three screenwriters dutifully re-create some of the iconic elements of the original, including the famous scene in which a shark jumps out of the pool in the middle of the lab to eat Samuel L. Jackson mid-speech (the version here is decidedly less amusing). They also throw in a scene of Misty in her underwear in a similar manner to Saffron Burrows' character in the previous movie, although less elegantly, and then make sure that Misty keeps her wetsuit unzipped enough to show plenty of cleavage for the rest of the movie.

Mostly they have the characters wander around a bunch of poorly lit corridors in water up to their waists (poorly lit corridors being a hallmark of low-budget genre movies), while some CGI sharks occasionally show up to chomp on them. The biggest shark-related innovation is that one of the sharks has given birth to a bunch of baby sharks, who swarm like piranhas when they kill. It's a good way to save on effects, since all that's needed to indicate a shark attack is a bunch of churning water. That shortcut pretty much sums up this cut-rate movie, which is far from the worst shark B-movie out there, but in no way lives up to the campy entertainment of its namesake.