Depressing cocktail of shouting and torpedoes

Hunter Killer

15 cert, 122 mins

Dir Donovan Marsh Starring Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Toby Stephens, Linda Cardellini, Michael Nyqvist

The question many of us were left pondering after last year’s Geostorm – a disaster movie in which Gerard Butler played a genius meteorologist who solved climate change by bombing the weather – was where on earth the Scottish action star could possibly go next.

The answer has turned out to be even more of an eyebrow-raiser: a submarine-set action thriller that skews so strenuously pro-russian its plot might as well have been emailed in from the Internet Research Agency’s Saint Petersburg HQ. Butler plays Joe Glass, a sub commander who takes his crew on an off-the-grid, death-or-glory mission to save the life of the handsome and dynamic Russian president, who is such a sweetie that his name is literally Zakarin.

Viewers familiar with Butler’s accent work in the past may be lulled into a false sense of security by a sequence that introduces his character silently hunting deer in the Scottish Highlands. Yet infuriatingly, he still turns out to be American. Soon enough, Commander Glass is being helicoptered to the naval base at Faslane, where he is given command of an attack sub and tasked with discovering what befell a US patrol vessel that recently dropped off the grid in Russian Arctic waters.

Meanwhile, a Navy Seals team led by Toby Stevens parachutes in to investigate further, and discover a military coup that looks likely to spark World War Three, and which can only be snuffed out with a full-hearted team-up, in which the Russians are given unlimited and unsupervised access to US military intelligence systems. Whatever it takes!

The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedoes. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.