Gerard Butler is the best thing in Hunter Killer, so you can imagine what everyone else is like. It has two female speaking parts, although it only lurches to two when a previously silent crew person suddenly chips in with about five words ten minutes before the end of the movie. I had a picture in my mind of one of the producers suddenly realising that there was only one female voice in the whole thing, and demanding that someone, anyone, get a line which wasn’t delivered in a macho rumble.
The movie is another one of those Hollywood techno thrillers where one bunch of guys are doing stunts and hurting themselves in the wilderness, while meanwhile there’s intrigue and wickedness in a situation room a millions miles away, featuring actors who ought to be doing something more useful. But who can resist an offer of two week’s work looking menacing from a chair? Not Gary Oldman, that’s for sure.
So, Gary’s minding the home fires, and Gerard is running the titular submarine, and then there’s four guys I’ve never seen before doing a mini remake of Lone Survivor as they try to rescue the Russian premier from an attempted coup. Apparently they originally wanted to shoot all this in Alaska, but Bulgaria was more convenient. On the one hand it doesn’t look remotely like the Arctic circle, and on the other hand it’s not all that far from the location where the Soviet Union almost did have a military coup of sorts. Gorbachev wound up stuck in a dacha on the Black Sea for a couple of days at one point during the great perestroika experiment while the old guard had a wee think about his plans. Whether 1991 was an inspiration for this movie, heaven only knows. It takes a long time for some properties to make it to the screen.
Anyhow, it’s a perfectly professional munging of “special ops against all odds” with “submarine sneaking around the place” and I doubt anyone would have missed it if it had never happened. It passed the time, but not so fast that I didn’t have time to notice all the dumb stuff. The chronology doesn’t make any kind of sense; the movie kicks off with a couple of submarines being sunk, and then the US sends another sub to rescue the survivors. It’s OK, according to the Washington navy guy, because they’ve got one nearby with a crack commander just assigned to it. Cut to “The Lochaber Mountains” in Scotland (Bulgaria again), and Gerard Butler is hunting deer with a bow, as you do. This is your crack commander, and he’s about 2000 kilometers from where he needs to be. I’m not sure how long it takes a nuclear submarine to get from Scotland to the Kola Peninsula, but my best guess is “longer than it takes for everyone is a sunk submarine to die waiting for rescue”. I might not have bothered with that, but they hang a lampshade on it by having Butler’s deputy greet him at the docks by wondering how long it took him to get to Faslane (Scotland) from Plymouth. That’s pretty much typical of the care which has been lavished on every aspect of this movie.
What I did like was a throwaway line as everything in the movie comes to a head; the US and Russian fleets are heading straight at each other and at any moment they’re going to start shooting if somehow Gerard and the Special Ops guys can’t save the day. To give you a sense of how tense it all is, one of the naval experts in Washington announces that they’re closing “to visual range”. There hasn’t been a fleet action since the end of the second world war, so to some extent no-one knows what a modern naval battle will look like, but one thing everyone agrees on is that waiting until you’re in visual range was out of fashion by 1943. You might think “Eh, only military nerds will care”, but who do you think the audience is for something like this?
No comments:
Post a Comment