The Deep

Proof positive of just how mediocre 70s mediocrity could be—any quasicompetent Hollywood hack of the 40s could have gone to town with this story, but under Yates's direction it merely lurches along, from one predictable danger to another.

Robert Redford need not worry that his golden-boy throne is in danger of being usurped by the ballyhooed newcomer Nick Nolte, whose performance here never transcends the boundaries of a Salem commercial...And anyone who can't help looking beyond the action for plausibility had better stay home. You're thinking too much if you can't accept Nolte's explanation for risking life and limb underwater: "I feel things, so I do 'em." And if you persist in wondering why no policeman ever gets curious about all these strange goings-on in sleepy little Bermuda, then you're nothing but a spoilsport. [27 June 1977, p.60]

It has sex objects for all tastes, instant fun, danger and boredom in unequal proportions, strobe-light climaxes, and Donna Summer in stereo. Furthermore, it does away with a storyline and dances on the spot for two hours, taking voodoo, buried treasure, violence and sea monsters in its stride.

Efficient but rather colorless...It’s possible that inside this slick piece of engineering there is a genuinely mordant satire of human greed struggling to get out, but it never quite gets to the surface.

The film will mostly be remembered for Bisset's wet T-shirt sequences.

The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.