Steineded How sad is this?

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

rodrig58 I love Robert Shaw and Eli Wallach, both two great great actors. Eli Wallach has a small, insignificant role in this. Robert Shaw is good but I love him much more in "From Russia with Love", "Battle of the Bulge", "The Sting" and especially in "A Man for All Seasons". Jacqueline Bisset is young and beautiful. Same Nick Nolte. Here he is not the great actor from later roles like in "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" or "Cape Fear". Beautiful underwater filming by Christopher Challis. When I first saw it, about 40 years ago, I liked it more (I was about 20 years old). Watched again in 2018, I find it static, monotonous, boring, does not have the same charm.

Leofwine_draca Based on a novel by Peter Benchley and written by the one-hit wonder author himself, THE DEEP isn't half as interesting as it sounds. This is an exceptionally dull movie, enlivened by only a few peripheral pleasures. Watching people swim about slowly underwater is one of my pet movie hates (which is why some of the Bond films don't exactly thrill me). I mean, it's cool that actors get to act underwater, but so what? Underwater scenes are just there for padding and take up half of this film's running time. The rest is taken up with dialogue between uninvolving characters and some half-hearted attempts at suspense when Louis Gossett Jr. brings in his strong arm gang to retrieve treasure for themselves.This is a film that rightly or wrongly appears to have achieved (ahem) prominence due to Jacqueline Bisset's appearance in a wet t-shirt, which no doubt whetted the appetites of many an adolescent viewer. As well as Bisset, the film is visually superior with rich underwater photography accompanied by an effective John Barry score which helps bring out the beauty of "the deep". It's just that so little happens during the two hour length you'll wonder why they bothered.Sure, there's an involving chase between a truck and two bikes, a cool fight scene involving an outboard motor (!) and a fun climax involving a giant eel and Louis Gossett Jr's head, but that's about all the excitement you'll get out of this movie (okay, perhaps Jacqueline should go in there too). Shaw seems wasted in a repeat of his salty old sea-dog role from JAWS, with an accent that changes every couple of minutes; Nolte is fresh-faced but boring as the young hero, and Gossett Jr. doesn't get to be near nasty enough as the baddie of the piece. Eli Wallach is similarly wasted. THE DEEP - occasionally fun, but mostly turgid and padded endlessly.

James Hitchcock "The Deep" has a number of similarities with "Underwater!", the 1955 Jane Russell vehicle. Both films feature a young couple (unmarried here, married in "Underwater!") who unexpectedly run into danger while on a scuba-diving expedition in search of a lost Spanish treasure ship. And both films rely heavily upon the physical charms of a beautiful brunette leading lady (Jacqueline Bisset here) in a bikini or swimsuit. Producer Peter Guber said of the opening scene, featuring Bisset swimming underwater wearing a white T-shirt and bikini bottoms, "That T-shirt made me a rich man."David Sanders and his girlfriend Gail Berke are on holiday in Bermuda. As both are keen divers, they spend most of their time exploring shipwrecks off the coast. (Despite the title, all the underwater action takes place in relatively shallow water). They recover a number of artifacts which lead them to believe that they have discovered an eighteenth century wreck containing Spanish treasure. With the help of Romer Treece, a local treasure-hunter, they identify the items as gifts being sent by King Philip V of Spain to his future wife, Elizabeth Farnese Duchess of Parma. (Just why a ship travelling from Spain to Italy was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda is a plot-hole never satisfactorily explained). There is, however, a complication. The wreck of the Spanish ship lies near that of the "Goliath", an American ship that sank during World War II with a cargo of munitions and medical supplies, including morphine. David and Gail find that they are in danger from a local gangster who is hoping to acquire the morphine in order to convert it into heroin. Another source of danger comes from the explosives on board the wreck of the "Goliath". The film was based on a novel by Peter Benchley who had also written "Jaws". Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "Jaws" had, of course, been a huge success, leading to Spielberg's being hailed as the heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock as "Master of Suspense". Robert Shaw, one of the stars of "Jaws", also has a leading role here as Treece. No doubt Guber and director Peter Yates were hoping for a similar popular and critical success here, and as far as the box office was concerned they achieved it. Guber's quip about the T-shirt making him a rich man had some basis in fact; this was one of the top-grossing films of 1977. The critics, however, were less enthusiastic and today, more than three decades on, it is easy to understand their lack of enthusiasm. The film's box office success is perhaps less easy to understand, unless one assumes that all those queuing for admission to the cinemas were young men so ravished by Jacqueline Bisset's beauty that they would do anything- even watch a film as dull as this one- to see her in a T- shirt. Yates seems to have been aiming at a Hitchcock-style crime thriller, but the film never really works as such. Bisset as Gail and Nick Nolte as David play their roles reasonably well, but Shaw is just as bad here as he was in "Jaws", and for the same reasons, overacting and affecting an eccentric accent. He seemed to think that because "The Deep" is about treasure he ought to play his character like a clone of Long John Silver. Or perhaps his scenes were shot on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. (Yes, there is such a celebration). The underwater scenes have a certain grace and beauty, although in this respect they do not perhaps represent much of an advance upon the similar scenes in "Underwater!", shot more than two decades earlier. The trouble is that everyone in these scenes movers so slowly and deliberately that there is little sense of menace or suspense, even when one of the characters is in danger. As for the scenes on the surface, they are just badly staged and unconvincing, and often badly lit. One thing which aroused less adverse comment in 1977 than it would today is the fact that the heroes are all white whereas the villains (with one exception) are all black. You could, it seems, still get away with that sort of thing in the seventies. The one exception is the character played by Eli Wallach, who starts off as a comical old drunk reminiscent of Eddie in "To Have and Have Not" but who ends up trying to double- cross the heroes. One positive thing about the film is a fine musical score by John Barry, but overall there is little else of much value about "The Deep", one of those seventies thrillers which have dated badly in the thirty-odd years since they were made. There is so little deep or profound about it that it perhaps should have been entitled "The Shallows". 4/10

stones78 I'm one of those folks who associated this film with Jaws, even though they are nothing alike, except underwater diving and Robert Shaw. An interesting cast included Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bissett, Lou Gossett Jr., Eli Wallach, and Shaw, who was very good as the experienced diver named Treece; other than his odd accent, I was very pleased with his performance and found him engaging. Look for another familiar face in Robert Tesier, whose appearances are always memorable in other films he stars in. The diving scenes are very impressive, and it seemed the actors did the actual stunts, although this I'm not sure of. The killer eel added to the mystique deep below the surface, but most of the mayhem is caused by Cloche(Gossett)and his crew, because they are after the buried morphine bottles; Gossett is also solid here as he makes the most of his scenes playing a man who knows what he wants and how to get it. The location and atmosphere of this film added to my viewing pleasure, including the great underwater shots, even if they got a bit tedious after a while. If I were to recommend the Deep, I would say watch this for a solid performance by Shaw, who also lives in a cool house too. I believe he passed away not too long after this film from 1977, so that added a sad note for me, but he is the best character here. Lastly, it seemed an odd circumstance to end the film with a disco song, as it didn't fit, but overall, I was pleased for most of the movie.