Black Sea | Review

Lower Depths: MacDonald’s Latest a Tense Deep Sea Treasure Hunt

While it’s being treated to a December release in his native UK, director Kevin MacDonald’s latest feature film, Black Sea, gets plopped into US theaters in January, perhaps signaling a wise move so that it will stand out amidst the litter of debris that constitutes the vein of awards fodder holdovers and studio doldrums flooding the theaters during that season. Fresh from his enjoyable dip into YA dystopia with How I Live Now, MacDonald returns to a tale bearing a bit more historical baggage, spiriting us away into a homosocial space of mounting tensions and rival cultural attitudes. A likeable lead performance from Jude Law plus a handful of nervy twists and turns helps its claustrophobic narrative chug along to a finale of limited possibilities.

Being informed he’s about to be laid off by his employer, Robinson (Jude Law), a submarine captain, joins several colleagues at a local bar to nurse wounds. After brief commiseration, another unemployed friend mentions that a vessel was discovered in Georgian waters that may have carried Nazi gold, meant to be a payment from Russia that never made it home to Germany. Finding an investor to finance the necessities of purchasing a submarine to extract the gold, with the help of his Russian friend Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy), a half British half Russian crew is assembled, while the investor’s lawyer (Scott McNairy) is forced into joining. However, the finicky crewmembers quickly disperse into their own cultural cliques, with Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn) instigating violent discord amongst the ranks that threatens not only their mission but the possibility of safe passage.

MacDonald cuts right to the chase in Black Sea, formulating Law’s Robinson as a loner who has devoted his life to his job at the cost of his own family (Jodie Whittaker is a phantom of a female presence, present only in wisps of Law’s fleeting memories), so his desperate bid for the Nazi gold is just as much quest for vengeance as it is a means to win his own economic agency in a world run by white collars that have little interest in the lives of those that carry out the tasks that allow them to maintain their comfortable positions. And thus, the film becomes an expression of vitriolic rage at the economic disadvantages faced by the unfair position the blue collar work force is often faced with.

But Black Sea is really more enjoyable as a straight-laced thriller of mounting pressures amongst the rival crew members, with Mendelsohn’s slimy troublemaker and McNairy’s spineless company man drawing the most disdain (they played equally unlikeable supporting characters in Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly). Other recognizable faces, from Michael Smiley to Timur Bekmambetov favorite Konstantin Khabenskiy round out the milieu.

As the situation becomes more and more dire with increasingly limited options, Black Sea becomes more of a man vs. nature flick than man vs. himself, and so one can easily predict where everything may or may not be headed. Yet it’s a great vehicle for the increasingly grizzled Jude Law with a performance reminiscent of another recent galvanizing trip into the id of masculinity with Dom Hemingway.

★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆