K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

K-19: The Widowmaker is the Russian answer to Run Silent, Run Deep/Crimson Tide, except that it's about as Russian as Michael Apted’s Gorky Park – still, not bad company to be in at all.

Like Gorky Park, which had two late greats in Will Hurt and Brian Dennehy, K-19 gravitates around two solid performers: Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in the Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster/Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington roles from RS, RD and Crimson Tide, respectively (also like Gorky Park, there is no trace of Russian other than what can be read here and there; the fact that everyone here speaks the same language all the time, even if it’s that which would be anathema to them, allows us to suspend our disbelief and pretend they’re all speaking Russian to each other).

Actually, there is a third, just as important, performance: the titular submarine emerges (and submerges) as a character in its own right; the problem is that it doesn’t do its own stunts. While it’s still in dock, it’s easy to believe in the boat’s reality and all that it entails; once it goes underwater, however, it also goes belly up. Like the Tom Hanks vehicle Greyhound from a couple of years ago, K-19 is at its best when the action stays in the vessel – and for a film where there are a lot of drills, this one is packed with tension and suspense.

The ‘exterior’ shots, on the other hand, makes us long for the claustrophobia of the sub’s narrow walkways. The worst offender is the scene in which Ford orders a very dangerous maneuver (and that’s saying something, seeing how Neeson keeps “recommending” him that they remain “at safe depth”) that culminates in the K-19 bursting through the Arctic pack ice. This sequence reminded me, believe it or not, of The Silence of the Lambs; specifically, the part with the crosscutting (you know the one I mean).

In that movie, parallel editing led us to believe that two separate events were closely related; in K-19, though, we have the opposite: two closely related events – the sub breaking trough the ice and the crew holding on for dear life – give the impression of occurring worlds apart from each other, because while the people come across as real human beings, the ice and the sub suffer from a pervading Saturday Morning Cartoon quality; i.e., they are shoddy as all hell.

All things considered, this is nonetheless a minor yet not altogether unsuccessful incursion from director Kathryn Bigelow on the kind of usually testosterone-laden genre that even on an off day she does better than many a male filmmaker.

A rather clunky cold-war maritime thriller that manages to mix plausible science with shallow propaganda in a rather cack-handed fashion - and a (mis)casting that gives the film the same sinking feeling that the submarine must have felt when it first put to sea. It's a synch that the 2-kopeck systems aboard this state of the art Russian boat "K-19" are going to cause the maiden voyage to be riddled with dangers, and Captain Harrison Ford who blindly believes that nothing can possibly go wrong both before and after the boat sets sail leads to loads of crew resentment - not least from Executive Officer Liam Neeson - who all see him as a sort of "Captain Bligh" figure. Technically, the film does evoke a genuine sense of peril and claustrophobia, but the stars don't really have enough to work with beyond their very two-dimensional characterisations and the sight of John Shrapnel (whose son Lex also features) as a Soviet Admiral is verging on the risible. It has moments of pace, and jeopardy - but they are few and far between and more than nullified by the rather dodgy CGI and really pedestrian script.