Jude Law Goes For The Gold In 'Black Sea'
The throwback thriller "Black Sea" has Jude Law leading a blue-collar dirty dozen on a daring salvage mission aboard a rusty old submarine.
IN "BLACK SEA," obsolete blue-collar guys stick it to the system that's discarded them while on a risky salvage job aboard a rusty, death-trap submarine.
If you surmise that the vessel is a metaphor for the doomed class of wrench-wielding labor, written off as "s---," you are correct.
Which leads to the movie's money line.
"This time the s--- is fighting back."
Throwing roundhouses is Jude Law, as Robinson, a Scottish salvage expert whose life at sea has cost him his marriage and hence most of his income, which he loses entirely when he's made redundant, as they say in the UK.
So he accepts a high-risk (and illegal) job proposed by a financier - take a mothballed Soviet sub to the bottom of the Black Sea, where lies a forgotten World War II sub full of gold.
Robinson heads out with a hand-picked crew of desperate men, half of them Russian (so as to man the Soviet sub), the rest a collection of castoffs, including reigning movie psycho Ben Mendelsohn, in rare form.
Mendelsohn's destabilizing, high-strung weirdo has echoes of Telly Savalas in "The Dirty Dozen," and "Black Sea" has that throwback feel - another Robert Aldrich reference point is the original "Flight of the Phoenix."
"Black Sea" honors those influences, even as it pursues a contemporary agenda that pits working-class guys against their big money backer - who, pointedly, stands to make most of the profit while taking little of the actual risk.
But "Black Sea" is no mere exploitation movie. It elevates itself by showing how the men aboard the sub are themselves changed by the lure of riches.
One look at their wide-eyed stares in the glowing bars of gold (shades of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre") and you know their loose camaraderie is threatened. The threat grows as the movie morphs into a tense, clever thriller built around dangerous, dirty work - diesel engines and dead batteries and dire circumstances.
It's not entirely credible, but it's involving and well-acted - anchored by Law, who's bigger, beefier, balder and yet to my mind better than he ever was as a blue-eyed romantic lead.
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