Black Sea—Submarine pictures almost always work, even the bad ones. There’s something inherently
dramatic about that setting, with its inescapable allegorical resonances about
the utter hostility of the environment outside the fragile cosmic and social
bubbles in which humans live, and the terrible interdependence required for
survival even within those bubbles. Corny dialogue and laborious dramatics
usually can’t defeat that atmosphere.
When a submarine movie has strong actors and dialogue, so
much the better. Happily that’s the case with Black Sea,
directed by Kevin Macdonald from a script by Dennis Kelly.
The star is Jude Law, spitting an indignant Scottish accent.
He’s Robinson, a sub captain who’s been laid off, with a pathetic severance,
from the salvage company to which he’s given his post-Navy career. He gets
financing to take a rust-bucket ex-Soviet sub to the bottom of the title body
of water, in search of one of the traditional adventure-movie McGuffins: Nazi
gold! There’s a sunken U-boat down there, see, containing a fortune in bullion
extorted from Stalin just before the war heated up.
Robinson’s crew is, again traditionally for the genre,
“ragtag”—a scruffy assortment of Brits and Russians, along with one American, a
repellent corporate rep (Scoot McNairy). Weary after years of risking his life
to make rich people richer, Robinson is determined that each member of his crew
will get an equal share, as all are equally risking their lives. The American
creep warns him that this naïve egalitarianism will cause trouble, and alas
he’s not wrong. Treasure of Sierra Madre-style greed, suspicion and resentment
soon arises, and spirals into violence.
Black Sea is like some
freaky hybrid of Clive Cussler and Noam Chomsky, and its overt, rather
fatalistic economic didacticism is often in danger of tipping over into
heavy-handedness. But it doesn’t, quite. Many episodes—transferring the
treasure across the ocean floor from the wreck to Robinson’s sub, for instance,
or trying to steer through a narrow canyon—are tense, nerve-jangling
showpieces, and the cast is an appealing rabble of grizzled seadogs that keep
the drama personal and vivid.
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