Few of us will ever encounter a shark. I’ve seen hammerheads in the Texas Gulf, but the two live sharks that swim around in the big tank at the state aquarium in Corpus Christi don’t look all that menacing. Yet sharks have kept the Discovery Channel programmers busy for years trying to exploit our fears.

With Deep Blue Sea we have yet another shark movie. Unlike Steven Spielberg’s mechanical Great White in Jaws, this one features three animatronic Mako sharks that are as smart as the actors. While the shark in Jaws stayed mostly off-camera, the three behemoths in this film appear so often that I looked for their names in the credits. If the sharks were really as smart as claimed, they would have fired their agents for getting them this gig.

The film opens at an offshore research lab called "Aquatica." A team of scientists have been tinkering with the brains of the three Makos to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. A venture capitalist (Samuel L. Jackson) wants to pull the plug on his $200 million investment. Someone should study his brain to ascertain how he could make such a pinheaded business deal.

Those on board include scientists Saffron Burrows and Stellan Skarsgaard, shark trainer Thomas Jane, engineer Michael Rapaport, and cook LL Cool J. A shark attack injures one of them, and in the subsequent helicopter rescue during a tropical storm, all bedlam breaks lose.

The movie turns into a hybrid of The Poseidon Adventure and Alien. The trapped survivors try to find their way to the top, chased by the three Makos. The only thing that makes the film remotely interesting are the sudden, vicious shark attacks in no predictable order.

The computer generated imagery shows each attack as though the shark has been fired like a rocket from a launching pad. Reality sets in when a shark slowly works its way through the corridors of the sinking lab. They appear to be as docile and fake as your kid’s float in the backyard swimming pool, which is where you ought to be instead of in the theater watching this chum of a film.