Having spent over ten years captaining submarines,
Robinson (Jude Law) is given the boot by his company. When he learns that there
is a derelict submarine hidden in the Black Sea, filled with Russian gold,
Robinson gathers a team together to retrieve the $40 million loot. It’s not
spoiling anything to say that things go horribly wrong.
While I try not to go to the cinema expecting greatness,
or get caught up in all the hype, with Black
Sea (directed by Touching the Void’s
Kevin MacDonald), I was ready for two hours of chair-grabbing tension. While
MacDonald’s latest is entertaining enough, with some impressively shot set
pieces and a cast who all do good work, it is virtually one predictable scene
after another.
Dennis Kelly, one of the chief writers on Channel 4’s Utopia, gives you plenty of signposts or
flashing lights during a scene, so that you know what’s coming. When Robinson
gives us a roundup of his crew, one of them is introduced as a “psychopath”
(Ben Mendelsohn who, in fairness, gives us a credible maniac instead of clichéd
beady eyes and an evil grin). You don’t win anything for guessing that all the
trouble starts because of this unhinged member of the team.
Slowly, the crew members are killed off, either through
accidents or greed-fuelled murder. Unless you don’t watch films all that often,
you can’t fail to notice a trend with the casualties: the least useful – or
thinly written – characters are bumped off first. A scene which is supposed to
be shuffle-around-in-your-seat tense is ruined because you know that a
character is about to die.
What saves Black
Sea is that, rather than being a nerve-wracking ride, it is heart-breaking
to watch the cast succumb to greed, their desperate situation getting even
worse. It’s all appallingly believable. Robinson and his crew have given their
lives to their jobs. The submarine is their life, outside of it they have
nothing, and yet the multi-million pound companies they used to work for don’t
value them, just see them as another wage, leaving them with no money, taking
demeaning jobs just to feed themselves. When Robinson tells everyone that they
will get an equal share of $40 million, you can understand when you see them conjuring
up all sorts of plans.
Jude Law gives a complex, career highlight performance as
Robinson. To begin with, Robinson plans the voyage in the hope that becoming a
millionaire will bring him his family back; screwing over the bureaucrats and
money makers firmly in second place. Yet as things go from bad, to worse, to
dire for the survivors, his priorities change, obsessed with getting the reward
he has earned, giving his ex-employers the finger, and risking his crew’s lives
to do it.
Scoot McNairy (Argo,
Gone Girl) plays a slimy Personal
Assistant and, as the film goes on, manages to make you sympathise with him. As
Daniels, he is on the submarine to ensure his boss, the investor, is getting
his money’s worth and that things run smoothly. Daniels mocks the crew members
for ending up working as paper boys or serving fast food; his only worry is the
numbers. In the third act, Daniels stops caring about money and just wants to
live. While he plots and backstabs to ensure he’s one of the last men standing,
Daniels is absolutely right when he points out that Robinson is only thinking
about the gold, not the lives of those around him; exactly what Daniels was
doing early on.
Once everyone is underwater, cinematographer Christopher Ross (Eden Lake, BBC’s United
and Blackout) turns the visuals up a
notch. There’s something bleak and beautiful about Black Sea’s submarine. Placing the camera in numerous cramped spaces
and using dim lighting, Ross makes the tarnished interiors, filled with pipes,
gauges and creaking machinery, another member of this double-crossing crew; everyone’s
home for the next several days is working against them, ending up as their
tomb.
MacDonald’s new film could have been just as agonisingly
tense as Yann Demange’s ’71, but is
held back by a seen-it-all-before script (there’s even one scene that dares to
use the old “drowned body suddenly springs out” trick). Everyone does their
best here, but with no surprises, nothing to make you question what’s about to
happen, Black Sea is a harmless way
to get rid of a couple of hours instead of being a full-on assault on your
nerves.
3 out of 5
Matt
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