Jude Law fights for respect 30,000 leagues under the sea in Kevin Macdonald’s submarine thriller Black Sea, in which a team of down-and-out ex-Navy types travel to the Black Sea to salvage gold ingots from a sunken Nazi U-boat.
Law plays the captain with a thick Scottish brogue, while Scoot McNairy plays an untrustworthy suit and Ben Mendelsohn a psychopathic Australian diver. Needless to say both are playing types they might as well have patented. Only Law is trying something new. He’s bulked up and broadened out, visibly thinning on top. His authority is convincing, if ultimately ineffective.
The script is the inverse of that: it does the job but is never less than glaringly schematic. The exposition comes thick and fast. Made redundant from his gig at a salvage yard in the film’s opening scene, Law talks about sacrificing his marriage, his family, for the job. Cut to his dreary flat on a local estate, and framed pictures of his wife and son frolicking on a beach.
At the local pub another disgruntled ex-employee tells him about the treasure, a pre-invasion gift from Hitler to Stalin which never reached Moscow and is waiting to be claimed on the seafloor by those stout enough to do so. Law is bankrolled by a shadowy businessman (The Honourable Woman’s Tobias Menzies) and buys a rickety sub from a Russian yard. He recruits a crew that’s half Russian, half sons of the Commonwealth, and tensions predictably boil over.
Macdonald made his name with gripping documentaries like Touching The Void and One Day In September, but his fiction films – the feature adaptation of State Of Play, the Channing-Tatum-as-centurion movie The Eagle – have always felt well made but not quite necessary. Black Sea has its moments, but it’s a film that telegraphs its every move.
3/5 stars
Black Sea opens in cinemas on Thursday April 9.
