Directed by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald, "Black Sea" has Jude Law in a lead role who, after being laid off from a salvage company, pulls together a crew to go after a sunken treasure rumored to be lost in the depths of the Black Sea.
The vessel at the heart of "Black Sea" — a submarine thriller set on a rusting bucket of antique metal — looks anything but navigable. "This sub's going to sink," remarks a novice crew member in alarm.
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"F------ useless sub if it don't," replies his more seasoned shipmate.
The premise of the darkly comic film, at first glance, seems similarly worn out: A crew of misfits undertakes a mission to find a cache of gold bullion, mired at the bottom of the Black Sea in a sunken Nazi U-boat. Yet the film, directed by Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland") is surprisingly seaworthy.
It floats — or, more aptly, sinks to unexpected depths — thanks to ballast provided by British television scribe Dennis Kelly's topical, suspenseful script, and the assured captaining of Jude Law, in the role of the sub's damaged, Ahab-esque skipper, Robinson. His injuries are psychological, though.
Three stars: Rated (R) and available at area theaters. It contains obscenity and violence. It's in English, but contains subtitled Russian. 114 minutes.
"Black Sea" is a throwback to the kind of movie making that's increasingly out of fashion. The redemption that it offers, paltry though it may be, is not just hard-fought, but wholly earned.
The story begins with something commonplace these days: a layoff. After 11 years commanding submarines for an undersea salvage company — a job whose demands have cost him his marriage and a relationship with his son — Robinson is given his walking papers and an insulting severance check. But when he learns of the aforementioned treasure, he's determined to get it.
Sick of doing dirty work for someone else, he buys a secondhand Russian submarine, financed by a mysterious banker named Lewis (Tobias Menzies), assembling a "Dirty Dozen"- style crew of equally down-on-their-luck British and Russian salts. Part of the film's subtext is economic inequality; it's almost a propaganda piece by the Occupy movement.
One old hand, Peters, is a broken-down geezer with emphysema (David Threlfall); another, Tobin, is a mere teenager (Bobby Schofield). Some have special talents — cooking, engine maintenance, navigation, etc. The sub's master diver, Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn), is described as a "psychopath."
As it turns out, that's no joke. Stirred by the tight quarters, the language barrier and his growing resentment at the fact that each crewman is getting an equal share of the loot — said to be at least $40 million — Fraser starts to flip out. In a submarine, that's a recipe for disaster. On screen, it's a formula that makes for a pretty rip-snorting yarn, albeit one that never entirely shakes off the cobwebs of cliche. Robinson's pining for his broken marriage and estranged son, for example — for whom Tobin is an unsubtle stand-in — is laid on a bit thick.
Still, Law mostly convinces, in a role that calls for his Robinson to be the increasingly fragmentary crew's glue, as well as its despot. Law exudes a intensity that is, like used motor oil, hot, gritty and efficient. Not only is that energy a welcome change from the actor's default tool — his anodyne, if slightly lupine charm — but it comes in handy when Robinson has to lubricate an impasse arising from an incident of violence precipitated by Fraser's volatility.
He gets the job done, even if in so doing he becomes less like the working stiffs he's commanding, and more like the boss man. Lewis's on-board flunky (Scoot McNairy) mainly serves to remind the rest of the crew that they will never be, no matter how much gold they find, "one-percenters."
Director Macdonald has a flair for the visual, and "Black Sea" doesn't disappoint on that score either. The film's patina of richly textured grime lends the film a gloomy, claustrophobic beauty that serves its mood, as well as its satisfyingly misanthropic message: Greed isn't good, and most people aren't either.
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