Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Deborah Unger, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport, Saffron Burrows Directed by Renny Harlin. Produced by Akiva Goldsman. Written by Talley Griffith, Duncan Kennedy.   Distributed by Warner Brothers.

Renny Harlin breaks this rule all over the place in Deep Blue Sea, creating lots of suspense around bad things that look like they might happen and then letting them happen. This has nothing to do with profundity but rather a perversely cheerful nihilism, much like watching a 7-year-old boy impulsively wipe out a battalion of toy soldiers with his toy dinosaur.

In this story of genetically enhanced super sharks attacking the scientific team who created them, Harlin is very effective with his first couple of shocks. During a procedure to extract proteins from one of the shark's abnormally large brains (in hopes of finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, a limb is torn from an important member of the group. Later, following a big, morale boosting speech by one of the film's principal characters, the latter is suddenly swallowed whole and ripped apart at the bottom of the ocean.

After that, however, the unexpected is no longer unexpected, and Harlin has only the script's cheekiness on his side. One by one, trapped characters on a sunken research facility are mercilessly dispatched by lunging sharks, without any hint of irony or tragedy. Granted, these people are stock creations akin to those in 1950s creature features, a resourceful hero (Thomas Jane), an ambitious scientist (Saffron Burrows), a perky assistant (Jacqueline McKenzie), an anxious technician (Michael Rapaport), a decadent researcher (Stellan Skarsgard), a plucky crewmate (LL Cool J), and a natural born leader (Samuel L. Jackson) with a dark secret.