I love submarine-set movies and I love heist movies, so imagine if I dared to dream of a heist movie set on a submarine. Well now I don't have to any longer, because screenwriter Dennis Kelly (best known as a playwright, although he did write the British series "Utopia") and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald (ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, STATE OF PLAY, TOUCHING THE VOID, HOW I LIVE NOW) have combined forces to make Black Sea, an ambitious if somewhat underdeveloped tale of rough and rugged men in a sub searching for lost Russian gold on a long-lost Nazi sub—something for everyone.
Between his roles in DOM HEMINGWAY and now BLACK SEA, Jude Law has put aside his charm and looks and replaced them, in the case of Capt. Robinson, with a Scottish accent and sunken features. Robinson has recently been fired from his longtime job for a marine salvage company, a job that he was so devoted to that his wife left him and took their young son. Obsessed with making enough money to win his wife back (she has now remarried a rich man) or at least provide for his son, he gets wind of a scheme so hair-brained, it must be true.
Apparently during World War II, a Nazi submarine carrying tens of millions of dollars in Russian gold sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea. It was such a secret mission that almost nobody knew about it except a handful of Russian and German personnel. The salvage job is brought to Robinson, who is tasked with assembling a crew and leading the mission without the Russian military—or anyone else for that matter—finding out. After paying back their financiers, each crew member has been promised an equal share of the profits. Most of the crew sees dollar signs, but Robinson sees redemption.
With a crew of 12 (split evenly between Russian and English-speaking men, including one sneaky American), Robinson acquires a rust-bucket of a sub, fixes it up and off they go into certain fortune. What could go wrong? Scoot McNairy plays Daniels, the sole American, who happens to represent the investor. If I told you he was basically the Paul Reiser character from ALIENS, I think you'd know about how trustworthy he is. But much like that sci-fi-action masterwork, BLACK SEA has an undercurrent of anti-establishment running through it. The bosses are as much the enemy as sharks or the Russian war boats floating by overhead. And there comes a point in the story where sticking it to "the Man" becomes as important to Robinson as getting the gold. These are all working-class tradesmen who have been forced to become grocery store clerks or newspaper delivery men because the fast-paced world doesn't have a place for them any longer. Desperation is the driving force that propels this sub.
Some of director Macdonald's finest works are his documentaries (most recently, he directed the epic Bob Marley biopic MARLEY), so authenticity is a key ingredient in many of his fiction films as well. You can almost smell the sweat, diesel and salt water that permeates every surface of the sub. The cramped spaces are so claustrophobic, you half expect the cameraman to trip over something or hit his head. But the crew members expertly glide through every narrow hatch and other small crevices as they would in real life.
My biggest issues with BLACK SEA are the portrayals of the crew members, most of whom are assigned a type early on, and they rarely stray from that or are given any additional depth as characters. Case in point is Ben Mendelsohn's Fraser, who we are told is a psychopath the first time we see him, and he pretty much does nothing but act like a mentally ill maniac for the rest of the film. Who would have guessed? Robinson is given a bit more backstory and motivation, which is key to the progression of the plot. Other standout performances come from Michael Smiley (A FIELD IN ENGLAND, THE WORLD'S END) as one of the few level-headed crew members, and Bobby Schofield as the newbie 17-year-old, whose girlfriend is expecting his unexpected child.
Macdonald smartly hired some of Russia's finest actors to play that half of the crew, including rising star Grigoriy Dobrygin (recently seen in A MOST WANTED MAN), as the young translator. But since we don't get much of a backstory on those characters, their abilities as actors are largely wasted. They're still wildly entertaining, however, and that counts for something.
Because the make-up of the crew is so volatile (the non-Russians don't think the Russians deserve as much money as they do, for example), this is possibly the worst submarine crew ever assembled, and many of the misfortunes that happen in this film are manmade. But on those rare occasions when the crew actually pulls together, some really fantastic set pieces result, especially the exceedingly tense gold-recovery sequence. For a film that probably didn't cost much money, the underwater sequences are pretty impressive, and Macdonald doesn't insult us by simply making everything so murky, you can't tell what's going on.
Between the camerawork, production design and skillful acting (led by Law), BLACK SEA pulls off most of what it sets out to do. As a pure piece of entertainment, it's firing on all cylinders (unlike the sub, most of the time). But since this is a film that dares to dig a bit more into the inequity of the world, you do notice a few cracks in the hull, not enough to drown it but enough to make things a little damp.
