The British submarine thriller Black Sea has an insistent political subtext that distinguishes it from earlier films in the undersea action genre. As its waterlogged treasure hunters brave fire and flood to find and bring back a cache of gold ingots from a sunken Nazi U-boat in the Black Sea, they grouse endlessly about paper-pushing rich guys who don’t know the meaning of real work.
Robinson (Jude Law, somewhat miscast), the leader of the crew, is a former British navy captain whose years at sea cost him his marriage to a woman he still dreams about. In the lulls between action sequences, Robinson has misty watercolour memories of his wife and young son before she left him to marry a wealthy man, another thorn in his side.
Robinson’s bottled-up rage surfaces when he is suddenly relieved of his post-navy job with an ocean salvage corporation and given a meagre severance. All at once, this hard-working man’s man feels useless. In a bar with other unemployed workers, he fumes about having led a gruelling life that has left him nothing to show for it. The scene establishes an ominous undertone of simmering class resentment that never eases up. Robinson seizes the opportunity to lead a speculative exploration for undersea gold based on a rumour and enlists a loutish crew of British and Russian seamen.
Because Black Sea, directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) from a screenplay by Dennis Kelly, begins with pictures of Hitler and Stalin and a Second World War montage, you prepare for a story that has some historical resonance. But once the treasure’s complicated provenance has been described, it is never mentioned again.
Disguised as an old-fashioned adventure film, Black Sea is a really a jeremiad for the new gilded age. At the outset Robinson declares that everyone aboard will get an equal portion of the gold, which he estimates will yield each crew member $2 million (Dh7.3 million.) That doesn’t seem enough to some of the sailors, especially the Russians. Everyone realises that the fewer men who survive the mission, the greater the individual reward. But because the vessel requires a crew of nine to operate, they can’t methodically kill one another off until only one is left standing — or can they? Edgy relations between the Britons and the Russians quickly deteriorate into a Cold War waged by Neanderthal tribes.
Except for one bilingual go-between, none of these mercenaries can be described as civilised. Even Law’s Robinson is half-mad with greed and repeatedly risks all the men’s lives to keep the operation going when it faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As roughed up as he appears, Law isn’t really convincing as a crude, burly seaman with a chip on his shoulder.
Robinson’s most sympathetic trait is his protective relationship with the crew’s youngest member, the 18-year-old Tobin (Bobby Schofield), who is bullied by older shipmates who wrongly assume him to be a virgin. The closest thing to a traditional villain is Daniels (Scoot McNairy), the duplicitous, smooth-talking assistant to the operation’s devious private funder (Tobias Menzies).
Black Sea delivers on the action front, as the usual problems — mechanical failure, fire, explosion, leakage and sudden eruptions of violence — imperil the voyage. Yet these sequences, while carefully parcelled out and adroitly staged, have limited visceral clout.
The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched. Well before it ends preposterously, Black Sea has taken leave of its senses. But one consistent element remains: the movie’s contempt and hatred for the rich.