Jan. 29--"Black Sea" is a submarine movie, so to many moviegoers of a certain age, that's 21/2.5 stars right there. Nothing promises old-school pressure-cooking the way the subgenre of the sub thriller can, and while director Kevin Macdonald's drama springs all sorts of leaks in its second half, there are modest satisfactions along the way.
There's also a strong whiff of class consciousness, if the message that greedy multinational corporations can't be trusted constitutes as much. With a thick Scottish dialect, Jude Law plays Robinson, a recently laid-off marine salvage skipper and British navy veteran who has given his life to the sea but destroyed his marriage in the process. Now, with a meager payoff in lieu of a pension, he has nothing. And nothing to lose.
Over a pint with a couple of other castoffs, he hatches a plan: There's a Nazi U-boat at the bottom of the Black Sea, off the coast of Crimea, rumored to be laden with millions in gold. "Black Sea" is about hostile, desperate men in close quarters who want that money. Robinson gathers a crew of Brits and Russians, all hired for their ability to glower. The mysterious backer of the raid is in line to get 40 percent of a rumored $40 million; the rest, according to Robinson's rules, will be split in equal shares among the crew.
Handled artfully by Macdonald, whose earlier work includes "The Last King of Scotland," Dennis Kelly's script pulls bits and pieces from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The Wages of Fear" and its remake, "Sorcerer." The second that Ben Mendelsohn appears on screen, preceded by a line referring to his character, Fraser, as a bit of a psycho, you know where the chief source of friction will originate. The acting's quite good; Mendelsohn, so vivid in the Aussie crime drama "Animal Kingdom," finds interesting ripples of seeming normality within his sociopath as written.
Law never quite seems like a shell of a man -- his heightened ebullience is hard to suppress -- but dealing with rickety equipment, or mentoring the teenage tag-along on board, he keeps the vessel more or less on course. Many will forgive all the contrivances and a muted ending that doesn't quite come off. It is, after all, a submarine picture.
"Black Sea" -- 2 1/2 stars
MPAA rating: R (for language throughout, some graphic images and violence)
Running time: 1:55
Opens: Friday
mjphillips@tribpub.com
