Deep Rising - DVDfever.co.uk

Deep Risingbegins with Finnegan (Treat Williams), Pantucci (Kevin J. O’Connor)and their crew riding along the waves taking a bunch of bounty hunters, headed byHanover (Wes Studi) and Mulligan (Jason Flemyng), towards theocean liner Argonautica, which is out on its maiden voyage. What he finds outat the eleventh hour is that the passengers aren’t the most friendly of peopleand are carrying nuclear warheads.

As for the liner itself, everything is going fine on its launch party, heldby its creator Canton (Anthony Heald, looking the spitting image ofa younger Nick Nolte) and its captain (Derrick O’Connor), untilwhat feels like a massive crash sends the ship reeling, almost all of thepassengers and crew end up in the drink without their lifejackets and it’sfeeding time courtesy of something very nasty out there.

Afterwards there appears to be only one passenger left, the gorgeousTrillian (Famke Janssen, Goldeneye‘s Xenia Onatopp) andit’s every man and woman for themselves as they fight amongst each otherand fight to stay alive.

What follows is over and hour-and-a-half of entertaining nonsense as goodand bad guys get picked off one by one, accompanied by plenty of blood-splattering,a lot of swearing, a lot of firepower being used, some brilliant SFX, plentyof one-liners, angled camera shots that would be totally lost were this not being played out inwidescreen and a lot more blood being splattered about, which seems ratherexcessive for a 15-certificate.

The picture quality is excellent. Anamorphic and free of artifacts, with thefilm itself presented in its original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1. The averagebitrate is a middling 5.1Mb/s, briefly peaking over 9Mb/s.

The sound is disappointly Dolby Prologic, not Dolby Digital 5.1 like theAmerican release. Aside from that though, this film is packed with surroundsound moments including explosions, gore splatter and more explosions.Add to this a rousing score by Jerry Goldsmith.

Extras :Chapters :Like a lot of their recent discs, 12 chapters again and again EiV haveprovided approximate times for where the chapter breaks occur. This timethey’re only an hour ahead, but seem to have spawned timings down to 1/100thsof a second !?! Who’s putting this stuff together? I wouldn’t even havehalf-a-pint of what they’re on! They’re also based on the film being 106 minslong, just likeWild Things,when it’s actually 102, so work that one out. Languages & Subtitles :English only in Dolby Surround but no subtitles. Trailer/Featurette :I’ve lumped these two together because they’re practically identical.The latter is five seconds longer than the other and just replaces someof the trailer’s footage with superfluous chat from cast and crew. Menu :The main menu is a silent and static affair with a deep blue background andweird pics of the two main leads. Options are available to select a scene,start the film or choose the “extra features”.

Deep Rising is an entertaining piece of nonsense just like the morerecent Deep Blue Sea. On the plus side we get an anamorphic transferwhich they didn’t get, but we lose out on a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack.As for extras, they only had a trailer but we didn’t get much more.

For anyone who likes a good piece of Friday night fun, this is the film foryou, but whether you purchase this over the American release will dependon your TV and sound setup.FILM : ****½PICTURE QUALITY : *****SOUND QUALITY: ****EXTRAS: *——————————-OVERALL: ***½

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Dom Robinson

Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.

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