‘Hunter Killer’ is a submarine movie on steroids
There are so many good movies in theaters right now—thoughtful, wellacted and well-told movies that the studios preciously save for this time of year with the distant hope of Oscar gold in their future.
The Gerard Butler submarine movie “Hunter Killer” is not one of those movies—it is bombastic and garish, ridden with clichés, preposterous politics and frenetic, video-game energy. And it’s often so unintentionally silly that it’s actually fun to watch.
In Gerard Butler parlance, “Hunter Killer” is the “London Has Fallen” of submarine movies, genetically engineered in a lab to entrance the nation’s dads in basic cable reruns for the next 25 years.
The film starts out confusingly. An American submarine is torpedoed by a Russian sub in Russian waters, but back in the US, all they know is it’s disappeared, and they’ve got to go find it.
The man for the job, Rear Admiral John Fisk (Common) concludes, is Captain Joe Glass (Butler), who is not like the other guys. He “never went to Annapolis.” Why that makes him especially qualified for this mission will basically remain a mystery, other than the fact that he’ll readily disobey orders and go rogue at any opportunity.
We meet him in the middle of nowhere, in snowy terrain about to shoot a CGI buck across a glassy lake with a bow and arrow. Then, he looks to the right of the buck and sees its CGI family close by and decides to lower his weapon. This moment lets the audience know a few things: a) That Joe Glass has empathy and b) that this movie has no subtlety. Next thing we know, a military helicopter is swooping down to pick him up and take him to his sub.
Their mission gets even more puzzling as a Russian sub hidden in the crevasse of an iceberg starts firing at them.
Back in the US, NSA worker Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini, one of three women in this film), decides Fisk needs to send a ground team (Toby Stephens, Michael Trucco, Ryan McPartlin and Zane Holt) to Russia, which ends up feeling like a short film by Peter Berg accidentally cut into a submarine movie.
It all eventually comes together when they realize that there’s been a coup on the Russian president, but why anyone makes any of these decisions prior to this is just baffling, to say the least.
Diplomacy conversations go out the window when the Americans decide—against the protest of Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman)—that their best option is to rescue the Russian president from his own soldiers and not tell anyone about it.
Based on the book “Firing Point,” this is the first Hollywood film from South African director Donovan Marsh, and he does cook up some captivating action set pieces, like navigating a submarine through mines, which may have you laughing, rolling your eyes, or even cheering, but at least it’s never boring.