Starring: Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn, Scoot McNairy, Tobias Menzies, and Jodie Whitakker
Distributor: Entertainment One Films
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2015
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This British adventure drama tells the fictional story of a submarine Captain who explores the floor of the Black Sea in a rented submarine, searching for rumoured gold.
Captain Robinson (Jude Law) is a veteran of salvage expeditions under the sea. He has dedicated his life to the sea at the expense of his wife (Jodie Whittaker) and family, and receives word that he is being made redundant unjustly.
Shortly afterwards, he learns from a former colleague that there is a German U-Boat from World War II that lies at the bottom of the Black Sea, loaded with Nazi gold. Legal problems prevent any one Government trying to retrieve it. The gold can only be salvaged by an independent backer, and he is approached to assist.
Feeling embittered, Robinson meets with Lewis (Tobias Menzies), a private salvage financier, and agrees to the deal he is offered. He captains a crew that is half Russian and half British, and tension erupts immediately among members of his crew with regard to how the gold will be divided. Fighting breaks out on the ship and a member of the crew is stabbed by another crew member. Robinson is knocked unconscious by an explosion, and wakes to find that he has problems.
On resuming command, Robinson finds that half his ship has been occupied by the Russian crew and the other half by the British, and the two halves are divided by culture and mutual distrust. The damaged ship lies close to the gold, when Robinson learns that even if they surface with the gold it will be confiscated and that he, and other members of his crew, will be jailed. In order to get the ship away, Robinson takes the ill-fated submarine perilously through a narrow reef passage, and with the gold on board and moving too close to the reef, the submarine begins to take on water.
The morality of this movie fluctuates between showing us the desire for riches by humans behaving selfishly, and heroic behaviour that preserves the life of others. Both choices are made in the course of the adventuring, but the film aims at holding its final tension by instilling anxiety about whether the submarine and its occupants will eventually survive.
For most of the movie, the actions of the people on board the submarine, as well as outside it, are determined by greed, although heroism surfaces at the end. It has become all too obvious that having fewer people involved means a bigger portion of the spoils for those who remain.
This is a film that stays away from special displays of visual effects, choosing instead to concentrate on the tensions that develop and escalate through interpersonal conflict. The film focuses on the attempts of the submarine’s disgruntled Captain to handle the problems of an unhappy crew. As the salvage mission becomes increasingly uncertain, and as the plot-line develops, the film builds up the feeling of threat, and mixes fear of survival forcefully with ambition and greed.
This is much more of psychological thriller than an action movie, and Jude Law gives a compelling performance as Captain Robinson. However, the Russians on board are stereotypically grim and stern, while others such as an untrustworthy financier (Scoot McNairy) and a murderous psychopath (Ben Mendelsohn) manage their own cliched versions of greed. Technically, the film is impressive. A lot of time is spent on the technical know-how of the mission and this helps dramatically to accentuate how ill-equipped to carry out the salvage operation both the submarine and its crew members actually are.
The film is well photographed and directed by Kevin Macdonald. The movie sustains a degree of tension that keeps its hold, and there are lots of closeup shots of the submarine and its occupants that establish a genuinely claustrophobic feel. But by aiming at character development, the movie inevitably invites comparison with suspense classics like “Wages of Fear” (1953), which depicts a culturally diverse group of men, also down on their luck, who drive a convoy of trucks carrying nitroglycerine on a bumpy road. This movie entertains, but never manages to achieve the level of terror, suspense, and anxiety that “Wages of Fear” so masterfully shows.
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