Director: Kevin Macdonald
MPAA Rating: R
I was just thinking the other day that I haven’t seen a good submarine movie in a while, when all of the sudden I find myself on the edge of my theater seat with Kevin McDonald delivering one of the most suspenseful undersea films I’ve seen in recent memory. Black Sea mashes up the standard conventions of a heist film with the standard conventions of an underwater thriller and yet still manages to feel fresh and invigorating through its strong cast and white-knuckle sequences of peril.
The film begins with Jude Law, sporting a thick Aberdeen accent, getting let go from his underwater salvage job and meeting up with a group of his peers at a local watering hole. One of them informs him of a possible job involving the recovery of more than 4 tons of gold laying in a sunken Nazi U-Boat in the middle of the Black Sea.
After receiving funding by a wealthy investor, Law’s character (Capt. Robinson) recruits a rag-tag group of seamen to pilot an old, rusted-out Russian sub to go find the gold and bring back a hefty payday. Of course, if everything went according to plan, the film wouldn’t be nearly as exciting, so things quickly take a turn when tensions between the half-Russian, half-English crew reach a tipping point.
Never before have I been biting my nails with nervous excitement over simply watching someone listen intently to sonar, but this film amazingly achieves that. My initial concern from the trailer was that the job itself would take a back seat to the squabbling and turmoil between the men. There certainly is plenty of that, but the bulk of the suspense comes from the seemingly insurmountable obstacles the crew must overcome.
While the characters themselves are fairly one-dimensional, the performances from the entire cast easily make up for it. It’s great to see Ben Mendelsohn (who plays the emotionally unstable Fraser) sharing the screen with Scoot McNairy once again. Both actors play characters you love to hate, although Mendelsohn seems nearly inhuman at times, someone you would never want with you on a submarine.
The film also acts as an exploration on the plight of the modern working man, constantly being screwed over by the invisible puppet masters, pulling the strings on people’s lives. At the beginning, this acted as a motivator for the men, to reclaim what they saw as something they were owed, but a twist at the end takes the concept and blows it up to nearly ridiculous proportions. Out of all the harrowing situations these men survived, I found this twist to be the hardest to swallow and the biggest let-down of the movie.
Twist be damned though, because Black Sea is still an incredibly exhilarating ride with some top-notch suspense and a fresh spin on the heist movie. If you want to see some bad-ass sonar listening, this isn’t one to be missed.
