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Jude Law takes a dive in Black Sea
BOne of the casualties of modern technology has been the old-fashioned submarine thriller, a movie like the classic Das Boot, set in a crowded sweaty, invariably rickety vessel one tiny misstep away from springing a leak and ending the film rather abruptly. Those thrillers have pretty much disappeared along with the submarines on which they took place. So, it comes as a pleasant surprise to watch Black Sea, a 2015 thriller sent on a submarine that seems to have come straight out of 1945.
The submarine doesn’t have a name; it doesn’t need one. It does have a captain, played by Jude Law, who’s been abruptly given the boot by the salvage company he worked for. When Law learns of a German World War II submarine lost in the Black Sea with a cargo of gold bars, he decides to retrieve the gold. With financing from a wealthy entrepreneur, he buys a sub off the scrap heap, recruits a ragtag mixed British and Russian crew, and goes after the sunken U-Boat, trying to get in and out with the treasure right under the noses of the Russian Navy.
Black Sea won’t win any awards for character development. The sub is filled with stereotypes like the doom-saying corporate flunky (Scoot McNairy), the psychotic xenophobic diver (Ben Mendelsohn), and a group of Russians who speak little or no English. However, once things start going wrong, the flimsy backstories don’t matter. Instead, director Kevin McDonald generates quite a bit of suspense precisely because this is one movie in which the audience really doesn’t know how things are going to turn out. Black Sea is a slick professional thriller, anchored in reality just enough by Law’s victim of corporate downsizing to engage the audience. It’s a style of film making as dated as Law’s sub, but as seaworthy today as it ever was.
Continue reading on Black Sea: Mini-Review
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