***/**** (3.5 stars)
Sacked from his job and estranged
from his son, submariner Robinson is suddenly offered the chance of a lifetime:
to uncover the legendary Russian gold lost on the floor of the Black Sea during
the Second World War.
This is undoubtedly your typical
submarine thriller, which ticks off all the boxes as it goes and adds nothing
new to the genre. You can even work out which characters are going to make it
to the end, because, (spoiler alert!) not all of them do. Still, for all of its
unoriginality and plot points that you can see coming from a mile away, this
isn’t a bad film. In fact, it’s pretty enjoyable. Yes, it is silly – Jude Law’s
accent wanders all over the place, and ludicrous decisions are made throughout,
but in places it is rather tense and there is a definite sense of claustrophobia
throughout.
As the rickety submarine (I would’ve
taken one look at the outside and run away) descends and tragedy ensues, the
duplicitous crew members begin to go mad, either from fear, the lust for gold,
or because they were complete psychopaths in the first place. Ben Mendelsohn’s
Fraser has ‘bad’ written all over him from the start, and his sudden change in
heart to take the moral high ground in the final parts of the film is a poor
piece of character development. The cast, boasting some talented names such as
Michael Smiley, David Threlfall and Scoot McNairy do well with an incredibly formulaic
script, but it is Law, as the brooding and tortured Robinson, who holds the
film together and stops it descending into absolute farce as thing after thing
goes wrong.
A by-the-book film, somewhat
elevated from complete mediocrity by a dedicated cast, Black Sea is still undeniably enjoyable in a very silly way. As a
claustrophobic, it is perhaps expected that I should be a little more engaged
and involved with what was happening on screen than someone who isn’t fazed by
tight spaces, but there is still some basic entertainment to be found here,
despite the silliness. Also, who on
earth wouldn’t at least frisk their morally dubious crew members for weapons
because they descended into the depths of the ocean?
Comments
Post a Comment