One of the last in a years–long onslaught of post-Jurassic Park (1993) creature features, Deep Blue Sea (1999) revisits a different beast closely associated with Steven Spielberg: the shark. It doesn’t feel the need to be that much of a Jaws (1975) knock-off — its species of choice is not a Great White but a mako, for one — because it would naturally rather call back to the fresher Jurassic Park, a movie whose thrills also all originate in a scientific experiment going awry. Its familiarity doesn’t present that big a problem, though. As directed by Renny Harlin, a skillful director of action, it’s an efficient creature feature, picking off its marked-for-death characters in a series of proficiently crafted set pieces that attest to how good Harlin is at fluidly staging action sequences with multiple moving parts. (A favorite touch: cameras shooting from a shark’s-eye view that call to mind drunk goggles.) 

Deep Blue Sea’s setting is great for this kind of thing. It’s a fortress of a mostly underwater facility where a more-glamorous-than-typical mad-scientist type, Dr. Susan McAllister (the high-cheekboned Saffron Burrows), and her more straight-laced partner, Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård), keep sharks in captivity so that they can do experiments on them. There’s some mumbo jumbo about how some properties in the sharks could be parlayed into a “lightning in a bottle” medicine for those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a disease a still-traumatized McAllister watched her dad endure in his final years. 

This all goes very south, of course. The facility is, inevitably, extensively destroyed; it’s left an ongoingly flooding labyrinth to escape for prone-to-being-killed surviving characters. (At least the Kool-Aid-blue water looks resort-pool warm.) Mako sharks are already intimidating enough for their speed: they really can, not just in movies, whip their fins to go up to 45 miles an hour. But Deep Blue Sea’s kind are worse, because McAllister and Whitlock’s tampering have made their already-smart sharks so smart that they can be vindictive and sneaky like Beatrix Kiddo.

Deep Blue Sea’s leads are nominally Burrows and Thomas Jane, who plays a hunky blonde with zookeeper-like responsibilities at the facility. But after a while the movie comes to truly belong to LL Cool J, who portrays the base’s chef. A good-humored goof with a coterie of potty-mouthed parrots keeping him company, he’s the often pretty funny movie’s primary source of laughs. But he’s also the character who sources anything like emotion — the only person in this one-notedly sketched ensemble whom you legitimately care to see live.