Deep Blue Sea is a film of many virtues -- cool-ass sharks, Thomas Jane in a wetsuit, more cool-ass sharks -- but its most outstanding feature is its remarkably economical body count, which also happens to be one of the highest in recent memory. In Deep Blue Sea, the characters are treated as sort of human special effects unto their own; the ones that can do something cool -- like grab onto a killer shark's fin and ride around the water, or make the audience laugh -- get to live. The ones who are useless, who know no tricks, and who just spend the movie screaming or running or doing something stupid to endanger the entertaining people further -- well, they die. Gloriously. With much carnage. And it is immensely, supremely satisfying. If only the far less tolerable The Mummy and The Haunting had taken such liberties with their stock characters!

The film tells the story of a team of scientists, led by Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows), who discover that by enlarging the brains of killer sharks and then stealing their protein content -- or something like that, it's best not to ponder such experiments too closely -- they can cure Alzheimer's disease. Needless to say, the sharks don't look kindly upon this act, and express their dissatisfaction with sharp white teeth and pointedly crimson water. Burrows, who has the body of a model and the voice of a female Patrick Stewart, is actually a pretty good actress, and she gives a sharp performance as a character who clearly needs brain expansion far more than any of the sharks do. A slightly lesser idiot is shark wrangler Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), a man who looks and acts like the love child of Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill and is therefore very fun to watch. However, the greatest performance arrives in the form of LL Cool J, the rapper-turned-movie-star who plays Preacher, the station's cook. Smirk and sneer if you must, but LL Cool J is one terrific actor; charming and hilarious, he steals every scene.

Well, every scene except the ones with the aforementioned Cool-Ass Sharks. The sharks of Deep Blue Sea are one of those brilliant ideas that just seems so obvious you can't imagine why it took someone so long to think it up. It's similar to the double-bladed lightsaber in Episode 1: what, one might wonder, could possibly be cooler than a lightsaber? Well, two lightsabers! What's scarier than Jaws? 10 Jawses! You get the idea. So did director Renny Harlin, who has completely redeemed himself for his Geena Davis-infested suckathons (Cutthroat Island, The Long Kiss Goodnight) with a film that is fast-paced, scary, and engaging even when completely derivative. As one of the many spawns of Frankenstein, Deep Blue Sea's don't-mess-with-God-you-silly-humans story is nothing new, but it manages to carry such an odd combination of clichéd scenarios and total unpredictability that you feel edgy all the way through. Deep Blue Sea is everything a Renny Harlin film about genius homicidal sharks should be, down to the body count, and as such, it is wildly entertaining.

DROOL FACTOR: As shark wrangler Carter Blake, Thomas Jane gives a breakthrough performance - as in I wanna break through his wetsuit.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: Severed limbs, bloody stumps, a really skeezy scientist without his shirt on... but the film is more scary than gory or gross.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: Saffron Burrows does a great send up of the moronically obsessive female scientist (think Contact's Jodie Foster on speed), and there's an amusing tribute to Ripley's superfluous Alien striptease -- only this time the girl gets near-naked for a reason.

-- Sarah Kendzior