Renny Harlin
74 connections found
Filmography
Cliffhanger 1993 
Die Hard 2 1990 
Deep Blue Sea 1999 
The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996 
Cutthroat Island 1995 
Exorcist: The Beginning 2004 
Driven 2001 
The Legend of Hercules 2014 
12 Rounds 2009 
Mindhunters 2004 
Skiptrace 2016 
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane 1990 
The Dyatlov Pass Incident 2013 
The Covenant 2006 
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master 1988 View:
Connections, in both directions
The Meg (2018)
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
influenced by Deep Blue Sea (1999), Cliffhanger (1993)
Visuals Plot
Say what you will about director Renny Harlin, but he at least kept his dopey shark film, Deep Blue Sea, moving at mach speed.
You assume it will either try to replicate the high-seas terror of Jaws, the Grand Guignol gore of the 2010 Piranha remake or the self-aware giddiness of this legendary scene from Deep Blue Sea ; instead, the movie just borrows elements and steals shots from a host of waterlogged horror-adventure flicks without bothering to channel what makes those movies a blast.
Ahí están los guiños al clásico de Steven Spielberg, Tiburón (Jaws, 1975), o a Alerta en lo profundo (Deep Blue Sea, 1999) calcados con poca inspiración, a diferencia de, por ejemplo, lo hecho por Jaume Collet-Serra (El pasajero, Desconocido) en Miedo profundo (The Shallows, 2016) donde, si bien, no se transformaba lo previamente establecido o se habrían nuevas veredas de exploración, sí se presentaba la historia como un gran juego visual de supervivencia, con colores saturados y situaciones ridículas dignas del mejor serie b.
The shark movie to which this owes the biggest debt, right down to certain character types and the odd death scene, is Renny Harlin’s schlockbuster Deep Blue Sea .
Scripts for a film adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror have been flopping between studios since before the smart-shark hit Deep Blue Sea rose up in 1999 and stole Meg ‘s thunder.
There are plenty of big set pieces, which either rip off or pay homage to everything from Jaws to Piranha 3D to Deep Blue Sea , depending on your view.
Likewise, any picture dealing with sharks will inevitably face the litmus test of living up to the original "Jaws."
The originality of "Deep Blue Sea", which manages to rip-off not only "Jaws" but "Jaws 2", seems to end with choosing Mako sharks to exploit rather than Great Whites.
It's no "Jaws," it's not really that scary, but it is fun.
July 31, 1999 -- "Jaws" was a classic, a movie that made a generation stay out of the water.
Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea, an underwater thriller which borrows heavily on the Jaws theme, is not the type of film to make any actor salivate over the script, but Jackson does as well as he can with a far-fetched plot penned by freshmen Duncan Kennedy and Wayne and Donna Powers.
What do you get when you mix equal parts Jurassic Park, Alien, Jaws and Predator together, throw in a dash of bad dialogue, and have a fairly decent action director (Renny Harlin) bring it all to life? Deep Blue Sea, of course.
Spielberg’s “Jaws” remains the benchmark of the effective thrillers about oceanic predators, but nearly all that have come after have gone beyond mere inferiority: many are just downright insulting, including a string of terrible sequels and a generation of ridiculous made-for-television “Sharknado” films (only Renny Harlin’s “Deep Blue Sea” was ever worth mentioning).
If you’re in the right mood, though, it’s a ridiculous, eye-rolling hoot: A sub-90 minute, check-your-brain-at-the-ticket-window diversion not unlike 1997’s Deep Blue Sea (minus the show-stopping Samuel L. Jackson death scene).
Deep Blue Sea, Kon-Tiki, Dinoshark, Soul Surfer, Sharknados 1-3 (with the fourth installment, Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens, planned for release in late July), and the many, many other films in the Jaws genre … all of them summon the fear that sharks are not just predators, but also—much more than other powerful animals manage to be—monsters.
The Great White stars of the Jawsiad quickly ceased to resemble any beasts found in nature — they were bringing down helicopters as early as 1978's Jaws 2. But even Jaws: The Revenge ("This time, it's personal") looks like Gorillas in the Mist compared to the 21st century made-for-Syfy-shark-portmanteau plague, which asserts that camp is a thing you can engineer the way the scientists in 1999's Deep Blue Sea engineered sharks with ape-level intelligence.
Unequivocally the best shark movie since “Jaws” (yes, even better than “Open Water” and “Deep Blue Sea”), this back-to-basics thriller either eliminates or reclaims all of the excess and gimmickry that have watered down the genre since Steven Spielberg first invented it — there’s only one killer fish, she’s shot in beautiful 2D, and it doesn’t appear as though the beast has developed the ability to swim backwards as the result of reckless genetic modifications.
But once Nancy is toppled from her board and forced onto a rock that’ll only be available until the high tide in the morning, the film morphs with surprising ease into a stranded-tourist thriller pitting an endlessly resourceful woman with a propensity for swimming into hazardous rocks against what appears to be one of the hyper-intelligent great whites from Deep Blue Sea.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick
influenced The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013)
Plot Themes
Of all the found-footage horror movies released since The Blair Witch Project , none has so closely aped the original, right down to the plucky female director (Holly Goss), the interviews with locals prior to heading out, the disorientation that renders their map useless, the discovery of human body parts, etc.
Directed by Renny Harlin (2006's " The Covenant ") and penned by first-time screenwriter Vikram Weet, "Devil's Pass" is an overt copycat of 1999's " The Blair Witch Project ," the picture hitting every single narrative beat of that innovative box-office phenomenon.
On the tapes, we see psychology major Holly King (Holly Goss) and film student/conspiracy theorist Jenson Day (Matt Stokoe) experiencing an uncanny sense of déjà vu in their snowy surroundings – a sense perhaps shared by anyone who has seen The Blair Witch Project or its many imitators.
“The Blair Witch Project” conjured up common fears by shooting in familiar situations and settings.
The Bluff (2026)
Directed by Frank E. Flowers
influenced by Cutthroat Island (1995), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Themes Characters Plot
For all their faults, at least films like At World's End and Cutthroat Island are recognizable for their own thing.
Geena Davis’ Morgan Adams in Cutthroat Island (1995)…
A Cutthroat Island, if there is such a thing, for a new generation: the Hudson Hawk of swashbuckling action-adventure that almost survives on the gorgeous, talented leads.
…you start to wonder if this is the pirate movie that should have been called Cutthroat Island instead of the actual film with that designated title.
Here, the actress channels great action heroines like Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight and Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde…
Filmmakers don’t want to make another Cutthroat Island, they want to make another Pirates of the Caribbean.
While there isn't really a Formula One racing film to compare to Ron Howard 's " Rush " (unless the Sylvester Stallone starring " Driven " from 2001 counts), the Nascar themed " Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby " came to mind with Jackie Chan 's " Thunderbolt " coming in a close second.
It's much better than Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder and Sylvester Stallone's Driven.
If those things are what you want, seek out 2008's dazzling, candy-coated, sorely underappreciated " Speed Racer " or even 2001's Sylvester Stallone ensemble action-drama, " Driven ," instead.
The Covenant, on the other hand, feels a little like a cross between The Lost Boys and Zapped!, replicating the boy-band evil superhero vibe of the former and the flip a girl's skirt up with your dirty telekinetic mind of the latter.
The opening steals blatantly from the 1987 teen-vampire flick The Lost Boys, when a team of sexy young bad boys make a gravity-defying entrance to a night-time outdoor party.
“The Covenant” is one part “The Lost Boys,” one part “The Craft,” and two parts David DeCouteau with homoerotic undertones, overtones, mid-tones and all.
Renny Harlin can't resist a reference to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye in his new f/x-laden action thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight.
When Shane Black wrote the screenplay for 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight , he broke his own record as the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.
He wrote "Lethal Weapon," "The Last Boy Scout," "Last Action Hero" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight," huge, noisy films, all of them, with ludicrous plots and over-the-top action sequences.
Back from exile after the twin catastrophes of The Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight torpedoed his high-flying career, Black's directorial debut is a madcap noir whose Byzantine plot about La-La Land murder and deceit, employment of traditional crime story tropes (doppelgangers, show biz sleazeballs, hit men, and whores), and homage-heavy chapter titles all reveal its Raymond Chandler roots.
Shane Black has dealt with lots of girls and guns in his screenplays, including the first, second and fourth " Lethal Weapon " pictures, " The Long Kiss Goodnight " and "The Last Action Hero."
Not just Lethal Weapon but The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight.
But Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is only Black's second produced screenplay since 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight.
With its confined setting and Christmas trimmings, Carry-On’s obvious genre reference point is the Die Hard franchise, though its slack pacing means that even Renny Harlin’s workmanlike yet enjoyable Die Hard 2 looks like a masterpiece by comparison.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
influenced by Cutthroat Island (1995)
Visuals Themes
Gore Verbinski who did an excellent directing job in the recent thriller “ The Ring ” conveys the true spirit of swashbuckling films in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, a film that is very reminiscent of the old Errol Flynn Pirate epics that stunned audiences in the early 1900’s in its truest essence; the swashbuckling film genre is dead only recently being brought to the screen with the bland “Cutthroat Island” a film that had style but little substance.
And Geena Davis... well, the jury is still out as to what the hell Geena Davis was thinking when she delivered us to the evil that was "Cutthroat Island"!
"Cutthroat Island" was one of the most expensive duds in film history and all but ruined the once-promising careers of Geena Davis and Renny Harlin.
The pirate genre has been in a perennial funk since Errol Flynn died -- burdened by latter-day efforts like Hook and Cutthroat Island which crushed their entertainment value beneath bloat and bombast.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
Directed by Michael Chaves
influenced by A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Visuals
An unsettling sequence involving a waterbed is rather terrifying (and perhaps a slight nod to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master ) and the film’s opening prologue, which features sly visual references to The Exorcist and The Shining , is genuinely unnerving.
Here, Chaves and writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick come up with a few fun horror situations and mimic quite a few more (including that waterbed scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master), but their execution sorely misses Wan’s deliberate stage-setting and unfurling.
Underwater evokes its predecessors with nods to the set design, narrative, and creature work of other films such as Leviathan , Deep Blue Sea , and, most notably, the Alien franchise.
There’s more than a little Geena Davis magic – à la The Long Kiss Goodnight – in how she nails down both halves of her performance.
The deserted island town is out of The Twilight Zone: A theater marquee advertises The Third Man (1949), yet there also is a USA TODAY box.
In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI's finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in- The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that's home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
Directed by Adam McKay
influenced by Deep Blue Sea (1999)
Dialogue
Her over-the-top pep talk is oddly reminiscent of Samuel L. Jackson's stirring speech in Deep Blue Sea.
It dates back (at least) as far as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and you may also remember it from popular action flicks like The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and The Bourne Identity (2002).
It’s another “clueless innocent becomes a killing machine” riff, a la “The Bourne Identity” or “The Long Kiss Goodnight.”
The hallway fight scene involving Arthur belongs in 2003's " The Matrix Reloaded ," where it was done better and featured more innovation; the snow jet chase reminds of more veritably exciting set-pieces from 1993's "Cliffhanger" and 2002's " XXX ," and the most subterranean level seems to steal shots wholesale from the early moments of 2004's " The Day After Tomorrow ."
Like a distant cousin to Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea ;it’s perfect monster movie fodder for a drive-in crowd .
Jurassic World blends the familiar (surrogate family units, a brittle adult learning to love kids) with the topical (sponsored dinosaurs, a plot to weaponise the creatures led by big bad Vincent D'Onofrio), while it lifts the genetic modification folly and dynamic between the mismatched leads from crap-classic Deep Blue Sea .
There have been various attempts: Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight ; Annie Parillaud in La Femme NilkitaM .
Not since the brief heyday of Geena Davis (sue me, but I still love “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) has a Hollywood actress with an Oscar at home demonstrated such capacity for big-scale, take-no-prisoners action.