Depending on who you are, you’ll either watch Black Sea thinking it’s dark and grim or fun. Either way you choose to look at it, I think this film has something to offer, even with the tiny space it’s given aboard the cooped-up compartment in which the length of the film is spent. It’s a healthy combo of a few familiar storylines that you’ve never thought about together before, but they work nevertheless.
Black Sea, directed by Kevin Macdonald, has a burly blue collar attitude to it, sticking it to “the man” and getting back the independence lost to the oppressive boss. How that works for our middle-class heroes is an ending I won’t spoil, but successful or not, that’s the kind of spunk I like to see.
The movie was shot and takes place in the United Kingdom (a British and American collaboration). Robinson (Jude Law) has just been let go by his employer when he hears from his colleagues a sure-shot plan to get money fast. There’s a sunken U-boat off the coast of Georgia back from World War II full of tons of gold, there for the taking. The lead was given to them by their former employer who found the location of the load but couldn’t access it during wartime. So, that means they can have it.
Robinson rounds up all of his scruffy companions, cheated out of the system as he has been, and invites them to man a submarine down to the site of the gold for its recovery, being a skilled captain of underwater expedition himself. Once they make it back to the surface, the booty will be split evenly across the whole of the crew.
Robinson’s not a politician for a reason, and it’s his method of distributing the loot that causes things to get a little out of hand.
It isn’t Law’s film entirely. Ben Mendelsohn is in for the money as another crew member, and Scoot McNairy plays a reluctant logistics guy sent by the person funding the trip to oversee his investment. McNairy is becoming more and more a recurring face, still playing minor roles but working his way up to bigger movies. I like to think he’ll get more attention in the future.
The thing I like most about this movie is the “uh-oh” moments. They’re scary and cool, but above all, you know that Macdonald is going to do something with them. Upon further research, I found he’s got some experience as a documenter, being a director for both 2012’s Marley and 2003’s very effective Touching the Void. He goes a little more theatrical with Black Sea, but it has what made “Void” so engaging: panic, reserved for when it’s needed. Because we need to work for our panic, right? It can’t just all be jittery, and as a result, the tone is what it should be, murky, but not hyperventilating. Mostly. It’s the signature emotion of the crowd “Sea” tries to represent, and the feeling’s done well.
You can tell when Law gets maybe a little too confident in his acting. I like him, but here, his accent is a bit clunky, and he sounds like a pouting pirate during key scenes. But as the lead of the movie, he does a good enough job to hold everything together. He definitely keeps the bulk of the attention that the film devotes to character development. Other characters get screen time, but they’re mostly just faces. I would’ve liked to know more about some of these crew members. With others, their responses to the situations that occur in this submarine are sufficient.
The score is garbage. All of it. I usually don’t pay attention to that in a movie like this, but I have to say it here. So many scenes could have had a greater effect if we weren’t listening to GarageBand. There isn’t any variation in the beat or instrumentation, just the stereotypical suspense music that went out of style before it was first used. Definitely one to forget.
But all in all, setting aside the aforementioned, I think we have ourselves a good, not great, thriller, one that actually thrills rather than mimics a spook. It’s when things don’t go according to plan, as events in a who-dunnit must, that we can appreciate the little surprises Black Sea has kept in store for us. Good guy or not (it’s kind of hard to tell in this film), it’s difficult to work with other people, and before we throw a fit about our characters’ unconditional cooperation as the story kicks off, a good script by Dennis Kelly soon lets us know they aren’t off the hook scott-free.
