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Stephen Sommers’ Deep Rising (1998) epitomizes the kind of cookie-cutter monster movie to proliferate in a post-Jurassic Park (1993) landscape: think Anaconda (1995), The Relic (1997), and Lake Placid (1999). What it lacks in charm compared to those movies, which don’t have much themselves, it makes up for in an unnecessarily complicated introduction to its murderous and gigantic big bad that will prove the most original thing about it. 

Almost entirely set on boats treading water in the middle of the ocean, Deep Rising doesn’t merely have a many-tentacled, acid-spewing monster surface to wreak havoc on the wealthy-to-the-point-of-toasting-to-their-wealth inhabitants of what’s said to be “the greatest, most luxurious pleasure ship ever built.” The film also has the contrivances of a band of mercenaries (Wes Studi and Djimon Hounsou among them) and the bemused captain, John (Treat Williams), guiding them en route to the ship so that they can plunder some priceless goods on board. Some of that work is already being tended to by a bubblegum-chewing thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen) who works independently and slinks in red pretending believably not to be the perpetrator of a litany of crimes including robbery and attempted murder. “It wasn’t easy,” she deadpans of amassing her eye-popping record.

Trillian and John are the only characters of Deep Rising’s wide-ranging, eternally snarky ensemble that feel the closest to human, unless you count an unfortunately fucking annoying crew member of John’s (Kevin O’Connor) who is the movie’s equivalent of Scooby-Doo‘s Shaggy, incessant voice cracks and all though without the ability to make whining somehow endearing. Everyone else is at most a type but far likelier to be not much more than moving meat for a creature whose omniscience gets comical fast. 

It’s a given you don’t like most of the characters — nearly everyone is so ruthless and self-serving that those characteristics mete out all others — so that you aren’t bothered too much about the increasingly nasty ways they will be killed by the sea beast. But the combination of actively disliking mostly everyone on screen and action sequences prone to monotony and an apathetic reliance on jump scares does not an enjoyable movie make. Though like how I do the elaborate setup, I appreciate the fake-out ending, which was an obvious bid at the time for a sequel (which the movie, which lost about $30 million at the box office, would not get) but now simply gets to be a refreshing bummer of a plot twist.