By William Wolf

BLACK SEA  Send This Review to a Friend

Under Kevin Macdonald’s direction, “Black Sea” works up the sort of suspense one can get seeing men trapped in submarines and fighting for their lives, but overall there isn’t much depth before the film emerges with a glib, not very creditable ending. In fact, there isn’t much credibility at all.

There is a promising start in the story, scripted by Dennis Kelly, when Jude Law as Robinson is abruptly dismissed from his job with a salvage company. He is given a pittance of severance pay. He is bitter, especially since, we are told, the demands of his work led to the breakup of his marriage and the loss of a relationship with his child.

But his experience when he was a submarine captain gives him the belief that he can go on an undersea treasure hunt. There is a report that during World War II a German sub carrying a load of gold bricks was sunk in the Black Sea and has never been found. The lure of a financial killing is there, and Robinson assembles a crew, which includes Russians, ready to take on a search using a reconditioned sub. He gets financial backing from a wealthy man with an agenda of his own. The motley group of recruits heading out to sea stands in contrast to those higher on the economic totem pole who control the money.

Down, down the crew goes in the treasure hunt. We know, according to plot clichés, that something must go wrong. When it does, big time, the hunger to survive becomes mixed with the hunger for the gold. We have seen such competitiveness in the artistic gem “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” a work that this low-grade opus scarcely merits mention in comparison.

When life is imminently threatened as the sub hunters rest at the bottom of the sea, Law issues noisy commands and tries to hold everyone together in the face of creeping disaster. Meanwhile, the film becomes more and more unbelievable as the sub supposedly laden with gold is approached through undersea maneuvering by nervy individuals in diving suits who discover the toll taken on those who were sunk.

The film holds a surprise, in itself unlikely, but along the way, the suspense goes full speed ahead, with shots showing Robinson’s sub at one point trying to inch through a narrow undersea channel. But as I watched what passed for the sub moving slowly between the obstacles, I thought of the time when as the anesthetic was wearing off I watched some of my colonoscopy on a screen as the tube worked its way through my channel.

By that time the film was obviously registering on me as a very routine story of men in danger with characters who failed to inspire reasons to care about them other than that one hates to see men die. A Focus Features release. Reviewed January 23, 2015.

  

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