Word: mastrantonio
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...situation seems promising. A nuclear submarine has a mysterious accident at the edge of an ocean canyon, and the only hope for rescue is the crew of a futuristic underwater oil-drilling rig working nearby. The rig's designer (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who is the estranged wife of its master (Ed Harris), drops down to help and bicker. So does a Navy diving team whose leader (Michael Biehn) suffers a psychotic break caused by the great depths. He becomes particularly obstreperous after he recovers a warhead from the wreck...
...good thing, too, because he is the only menace around -- not nearly enough to sustain this endless tale. As it turns out, there is nothing else in the deep except some benign escapees from Steven Spielberg country. Harris and Mastrantonio do have a strong death and resurrection sequence, but long before that, one is pining for a rubber shark or a plastic octopus -- anything, in fact, out of a good old low-tech thriller...
...they lack stage training and technique for the classics or succumb to the heebie-jeebies of stage fright. Director Harold Guskin, a noted acting coach, has coaxed his players into charm and clarity in telling myriad tales of mistaken identity, most of which turn on the interchangeability of gender. Mastrantonio lacks the requisite androgyny but is otherwise faultless. Woodard, one of four black leads chosen in admirably color-blind casting, excels at seductive banter, and Andre Braugher is thrillingly intense as a pirate who risks his life to help a shipwrecked princeling. Hines serves mostly as a vaudevillian onlooker whose...
...grieving countess Olivia. Jeff Goldblum (The Fly) is her pettish steward Malvolio, John Amos (Roots) her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch and Gregory Hines (The Cotton Club) Toby's companion in ribaldry, the jester Feste. Stephen Collins (Tattinger's) is the duke who desires Olivia, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) the girl-masquerading-as- a -pageboy sent to plead his case. Among other screen and stage stalwarts rounding out the troupe is Charlaine Woodard (Ain't Misbehavin') as the merrily scheming maid Maria...
...Guskin either had no larger vision of the play or could not express it. The performances clash in tone and degenerate into monologues and star turns, all but devoid of emotional connection save in the first tender flirtation between Pfeiffer and the disguised Mastrantonio. By far the worst offender is Goldblum, who seemingly has no clue about his character. In a blatant pitch for cheap laughs, he relies on grimaces and gestures from The Fly, topping them off with a pantomime of catching and eating some insect. At best the show skitters along the surface of a script rich...