Jason
says: “The basic ingredients of BLACK SEA don’t appeal to everyone, but
it’s got claustrophobic subs, lost Nazi gold, an underwater setting
that can look like an alien landscape, and grizzled ex-Navy types who
respond to an investor representative’s worries that the ship will sink
with ‘it’d be a useless fucking submarine if it didn’t’. It’s maybe not
quite the ideal arrangement of those things, but good enough for an
afternoon’s thrills.
“The first piece to fall in place is Robinson (Jude Law), a Scottish
submarine pilot being laid off after more than ten years with an
underwater salvage company. He’s commiserating with fellow downsizing
victims Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy) and Kurston (Daniel Ryan) about
lousy job prospects when Kurston mentions something he spotted in the
Black Sea a year ago – a WWII U-boat that sank while carrying over two
tons of gold that the Soviets sent Germany as a loan before the two
were at war, ripe for the taking since ownership of the area is
disputed between Russia and Georgia. Soon enough, they’re underway with
a half-British, half-Russian crew, although the Russians want nothing
to do with Tobin (Bobby Schofield), an 18-year-old kid who takes
Kurston’s place, and nobody cares for Daniels (Scoot McNairy), the
‘banker’ there to represent the investors’ interests.
“And then there’s the likes of Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn), who is the best
diver for this sort of job but also a pot-stirrer, which the other
twelve people in a rusty Soviet-era sub don’t really need. To a certain
extent, the movie doesn’t need it either; there’s more than enough
inherent peril to the situation to make for an exciting adventure
without setting the crew at each other’s throat. That’s especially true
when you consider that Dennis Kelly’s script often seems to raise,
drop, and reconfigure those tensions in fairly arbitrary ways: Fraser
will throw the ship into utter calamity, but then there will be
remarkably little tension when the movie needs him to just be an expert
diver. Daniels is an afterthought for much of the movie. The practical
difficulties of the two halves of the crew not being able to understand
each other because only Blackie is bilingual and he’s out of action are
not an issue for very long.
“When Kelly and director Kevin Macdonald focus on the nuts and bolts of
a daring underwater heist, on the other hand, things get pretty great.
Macdonald has an eye for the mechanics of this job, and while the
specifics can be daunting, he’s pretty good at communicating what is
going on clearly. It can be tricky to show the audience things while
still getting across that the people in the sub are limited in their
perceptions by the gifted ears of sonar operator Baba (Sergey Veksler),
but he manages it, and what we do get to see is often nifty, from a
half-buried U-boat to the horror movie imagery that sneaks in around
the corners.
“It’s a dirty, claustrophobic environment, with times where everything
seems to vaguely be the color of machine oil, and the cast fits right
into that, mostly a weathered-looking group with dry, often hostile,
working-class wit. The Russians fit the bill the best, with Sergey
Veksler, Sergey Puskepalis, and Grigoriy Dobrygin making their
characters suitably wary of their British counterparts but still doing
solid character work despite not talking a lot and the film mostly
happening from the English-speakers’ perspective. Even if they and the
Brits don’t much seem to like each other, they clearly come from the
same sort of place, even if it comes out differently, whether from
David Threlfall’s old hand or Ben Mendelsohn’s psycho diver. In
contrast to these working men of the sea, Scoot McNairy never seems to
leap out as Daniels – McNairy always seems like a guy who should crush
this sort of part, but never quite does.
“Jude Law is in the center as Robinson, and it’s a tough place to be,
not just because the Scots accent initially seems wrong coming out of
his mouth. There’s something almost there about his performance as
Robinson that isn’t necessarily on him, as he hits the bitterness of a
guy who has lost everything he holds dear well from the start, and even
does well with Robinson’s latching onto Tobin as a surrogate son even
though it seems out of place in practical terms, but he has a hard time
birthing an obsession out of those two parents as the film needs it,
perhaps because we’ve been seeing them in turn rather than in parallel.
He plays well off relative newcomer Bobby Schofield, though, and
Schofield does a nice job of making Tobin more than just a reminder of
how Robinson’s life went wrong.
“It’s all shot on an actual Soviet sub that looks authentic and cramped
while still giving the filmmakers room to work and have things look
good, making for a dirty but well-made movie. Black Sea is not quite
the best undersea adventure you’ll ever see, but it’s certainly got its
moments, enough to make it worth a big-screen trip for fans of the
genre. 3.75 cats
“Seen 31 January 2015 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)” |
