Oscar winning director Kevin MacDonald is as hit or miss as he is dextrous. Hopping from documentary (winning the best documentary Oscar with 1999’s One Day In September) to narrative features (his Last King Of Scotland won Forrest Whittaker a Best Actor Oscar in 2007) with varying degrees of success, I’ve largely enjoyed the films of his that I’ve seen, even if they haven’t all stood the test of time. His mountain climbing doc Touching The Void was absolutely gripping, but his pre-21 Jump Street Channing Tatum Roman soldier vehicle The Eagle fell pretty flat. MacDonald’s name on a film doesn’t guarantee my butt in a seat, is what I’m trying to say. Nor does Jude Law’s name on the marquee. I like the work, in general, of both director and star of Black Sea, but was in no way certain of how this film would play out.
As a matter of fact, I knew little about the film at all going in. While neither director nor star were enough to convince me to check the film out, I was helpless against other elements, such as the film being a submarine thriller, and also featuring character actors Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy. I love those dudes. And I’m not messing around when it comes to submarine movies either.
As it turns out, Black Sea is a submarine thriller set in modern times. And taking the typical thrills and drama of submarine cinema and planting them into the modern day offered more than I would have expected, giving things a fresh feeling of blue collar resentment.
Black Sea has all kinds of “kitchen sink” elements thrown in that, frankly, are all awesome. This movie offers a ton of old school tropes from a rag-tag group of crusty seamen on a mission (who are the best at what they do) to secret Nazi gold to righteous blue collar indignation to the corrupting power of greed. This may sound like a lot of plot and thematic material to juggle, but it all fits within the confines of an [ahem] airtight script from writer Dennis Kelly (whose work I am unfamiliar with, but which has been written about here on Cinapse by Jon Partridge in his piece about Utopia).
I found Jude Law’s character to be quite compelling, and a perfect fit for a slightly aging Law who never quite attained superstar status but who may also just be hitting his stride. Captain Robinson has spent a career at sea, honing an incredibly specified skill set that, when his company unceremoniously lays him off at the outset of the film, leaves him without many options. Having become estranged from his own family because of the time he’s spent at sea, Robinson has nothing left but a “particular set of skills” and a seething resentment of the upper crust. So when a similarly sacked former co-worker describes an abandoned WWII sub lying at the bottom of the ocean filled with Nazi gold, which is only still there because of various international ownership disputes, Robinson brings the band back together, forming a team of pirates who are desperate enough to go it on their own to snatch this gold from the clutches of the powers that be and claim a well-deserved fortune for their years of hard work. Of course, this team of men are held together at the seams by Robinson himself and a bi-lingual Russian man who keeps the peace between his own Russian contingent of sailors and the English-speaking crew members. Scoot NcNairy plays an inexperienced money man who is only on the boat because the mission’s shadowy investor required it. Mendelsohn is an Australian diver who is about the only person in the world with the skills needed to pull of this mission, but who also happens to be certifiably insane. And in a further effort to round out Law’s character, Robinson makes a seemingly heart-felt decision to bring a young man (Tobin, Bobby Schofield) onto the team who has no submarine experience whatsoever, but who is just desperate enough to make the trek.
These guys are so rag tag that they are already covered in grease and grime before they even board the sub.
And oh, that sub. An ancient, rusty hulk; their benefactor had to purchase them a vessel far enough off the radar as to not attract attention to it, and it is as crusty as the sailors who board it. As with any movie featuring the lustful quest for gold, this mission is destined to fall apart in spectacularly cramped and crazed ways. Mendelsohn’s Frazer is one of the biggest wrenches in the works as he stirs up tension between the Russians and the English speakers, not to mention calling into question Robinson’s plan to divide the earnings equally between each crew member. Tensions rise, aged mechanisms fall apart, and the desperate dreams of downtrodden men cause violence and superstition and old Cold War tensions to bubble to the surface.
Robinson does what he can to provide a true north for the crew, but when Robinson’s own true north is “get dat Nazi gold”, well, you can see where all of this might be going. And although we all know things will fall apart, we can’t be certain who lives, who dies, or whether the blue collar 99% will prevail over the faceless, controlling 1%. And the joy that comes from watching men who can’t get along to save their lives but who are uniquely gifted at one thing (manning a sub) is palpable.
In a sense, Black Sea is exactly the submarine thriller that 2015 needs. Roiling with class discontent and packed with everymen who resent their lot in life after working to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in a system that has failed to offer them any upward mobility, I couldn’t help but feel solidarity with the men who seemed to have found a way to take what was owed them from under the noses of the establishment that had cast them out. This crusty submarine film keeps you engaged in the characters’ quests, keeps your jaw clenched with tension, and delivers an old-style Hollywood thriller that feels ripe for the modern day.
And I’m Out.