Black Sea review: Jude Law is lost at sea…

Tensions run high in Kevin Macdonald’s (“The Last King of Scotland”) 2014 dark submarine thriller. The director tellingly uses an original script by playwright Dennis Kelly.

Our dependable hero, or deranged captain, Jude Law goes for broke as the recently redundant skipper who agrees to pilot a rust-bucket Soviet sub into hostile waters in search of a Nazi U-boat laden with treasure.

With a rag-tag team of antagonistic Brits and Russians at one another’s throats in the pressure-cooker environment, the sub runs silent and deep, dropping under the radar with life-threatening consequences.

Can the crew find the booty and split the spoils without being detected?

Or will the harsh economic realities of “equal shares” (the fewer the survivors, the greater the cut) cause them to kill one another in pursuit of fool’s gold?

There are some nailbiting set pieces (a slow crawl across the ocean floor, a standoff in the engine room) and a sense of impending doom, all well handled by Jude Law who captains this ship with stripped-down efficiency.

The heist movie and the submarine picture. These things go together so perfectly that it’s a wonder they were ever apart.

Law’s character, Robinson, is not your typical Navy hunk. He’s more of a working-class hero, as bitterly angry about his lot in life. When the story begins, he’s looking for redemption after losing his wife and child, well, to the sea; he spent the better part of 30 years in submarines, returning home only occasionally, and finally his spouse decided she’d had it. Now Robinson has nothing from his marriage but flashbacks to a beach vacation.

Robinson’s half-English, half-Russian crew are variations on his type: guys who don’t fit into life on land. And now they’re all in the same boat, so to speak, risking everything for One Last Big Score.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

“Black Sea” combines its two genres with such enthusiasm that although the gears don’t mesh perfectly and some of the story beats are predictable, the result is so altogether pleasurable. Like most submarine films, this is a pressure-cooker story about what happens when already-tense men pile into a glorified tin can and spend a few weeks underwater.

While it may not rival the films to which it alludes, this remains a convincingly muscular genre piece with plenty of dramatic clout.

4/5 stars