AUDIENCES who can buy Jude Law as a grizzled Scottish sea-dog may get a kick out of Kevin Macdonald’s Black Sea, a semi-waterlogged confluence of the submarine and heist sub-genres which seeks to evoke a testosterone-soaked, 1970s feel.
Torpedoed by a screenplay that laboriously updates Alistair MacLean tropes to a post-post-Cold-War 21st century seascape, this unambiguously adult-oriented thriller could connect with grit-hungry audiences in its native UK but may find itself in choppier waters elsewhere. The prominent presence in the cast of Russian stars Konstantin Khabensky and Grigoriy Dobrygin, will boost prospects across eastern Europe.
Submarine pictures have long depended on the evocation and escalation of claustrophobia, so there’s much to be said for adding an extra layer of confinement by setting the action in an enclosed area such as the eponymous California-sized body of water, rather than the usual open oceans.
And Dennis Kelly’s script proceeds from a plausible historical basis, involving the shipment of a huge quantity of gold from the USSR to Nazi Germany in 1941 just before those two nations entered into catastrophic conflict. Seven decades later, a team of mercenary blokes go in search of the long-submerged U-Boat. The operation is funded by a shady businessman and led by Law’s Robinson. Further signs of ill-fortune abound, while the men’s choice of vessel looks like it could have served alongside the Battleship Potemkin.
There’s much talk of how the gold-hunt involves eluding the watchful eyes of the nearby Russian navy, but external threats are much less of a hazard than internal strifes between the Russky crew-members and their English-speaking colleagues. Most volatile among the latter is Frasier (Ben Mendelsohn), a knife-thumbing Australian “psychopath” whose violent streak proves a lazy pivot for the narrative.
Mendelsohn is here a welcome source of dry Ocker wit, and those ultra-reliable character players Michael Smiley and David Threlfall also make much of their underwritten roles. Big-screen debutant Kelly, is much more interested in teenage greenhorn Tobin (Bobby Schofield), a happy-go-lucky Scouser whose impending fatherhood allows him to bond with guilt-ridden divorcee-dad Robinson.
The latter’s back-story allows Macdonald to shoehorn in the picture’s sole significant female presence, Jodie Whittaker cameoing via shimmery, echoey flashbacks as Robinson’s ex. Our tormented hero’s back-story ranks among the cornier aspects of the enterprise, Law’s attempted transition from Dr. Watson to Jason Statham-esque territory foundering amid the ruins of his supposedly Aberdonian accent. Perhaps Macdonald and Kelly sought to honour The Hunt for Red October by evoking aural memories of Sean Connery — dangerous to evoke memories of such illustrious precedents. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter