‘Black Sea’ is a terrific ‘men on a mission’ matinee

Kevin Macdonald’s submarine adventure starring Jude Law offers old-school thrills.

Source: SBS

For a submarine movie, Black Sea is built like a tank. It’s a robust adventure story with solid, well-drawn characters, clear (and high) stakes, omnipresent danger and a high ideal or two. Fifty years ago it might have starred Gregory Peck or Sean Connery. Released in 2014, it instead features Jude Law, here trading luvvie glamour for working class rugged charisma.

When we meet Scottish salvage expert and submarine skipper Robinson (Law), he’s unemployed, having recently been let go after remote vehicle technology has made him surplus to requirements, and struggling to make child support payments. Desperate and feeling betrayed by the company he devoted decades to, he gets wind of an unbelievable fortune – a sunken U-boat stuffed to the bulkheads with Nazi gold.

The wreck is off the coat of Georgia in waters contested by Russia, and so a secret plan is hatched: with money from a shady venture capitalist (Tobias Menzies), the doughty Robinson puts together a mixed crew of British and Russian submariners and sets off from Sebastopol in a clapped out surplus Russian diesel submarine to salvage all that Third Reich bullion – or die trying.

Jude Law is on a mission Source: SBS

Black Sea isn’t so much a film as a yarn or a ripping tale; one of those classical adventure movies seemingly designed to be viewed on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a big lunch. There’s something comforting about this kind of familiar but well told fare. Yet for all that, Black Sea pulls absolutely zero punches. It’s a taut, sweaty, unbearably tense experience, as a mixed bag of shady characters with few reasons to trust each other cram into a dripping, claustrophobic, coffin of a boat and brave the crushing depths in search of fortune. Outside the thin hull of their sub is certain death – a lifeless void of freezing water. Inside is, well, not much better, as resentment grows between the British and Russian halves of the hastily assembled crew.

This kind of thing demands a roster of great character actors, and Macdonald has assembled a crack team: the great Ben Mendelsohn as Fraser, the unstable Australian diver with a chip on his shoulder; Scoot McNairy as the company stooge sent along on the mission to keep an eye on things; Michael Smiley and David Threlfall as a couple of Robinson’s old salvage buddies; Grigoriy Dobrygin and Konstantin Khabenskiy as the most prominent of the Russian contingent; plus newcomer Bobby Schofield as the inexperienced kid along on his first voyage. Schofield aside, these guys are old hands and know how to sketch their characters quickly and distinctively, bringing life to men who are defined largely by their jobs.

And then there’s Jude Law’s Robinson, a man defined not so much by his job as his seething, unquenchable anger at having it taken from him. In the normal course of events, the leader of the team in one of these stories would be the kind of guy who puts the safety of his men ahead of material considerations. Robinson isn’t that guy. He’s a have-not who is mad as hell at the haves, who’ve taken everything from him – his job, his wife and son (Robinson is divorced and his ex-wife’s new partner is a wealthy man – another have), his dignity, his future. For Robinson, the gold they’re trying to salvage isn’t just enough money to keep him in clover for the rest of his days – it’s steeped in symbolism, not the least of which is a huge raised middle finger to the people and power structures that have slowly but surely crippled the working class.

It’s this class awareness that makes the film stand out. It’s an angry story about honest men pushed to desperate lengths by uncaring capitalism, and the stark realities of their economic and social situation underpins every turn of the plot. That Macdonald and his screenwriter, Dennis Kelly, manage to deal with these themes without letting them overwhelm the central propulsive narrative is impressive: whatever level you choose to engage with it on, Black Sea is never less than gripping.