GREYHOUND
★★★ OUT NOW / APPLE TV+ CERT 12 / 91 MINS
DIRECTOR Aaron Schneider
CAST Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan
PLOT 1942. US Naval commander Ernest Krause (Hanks) takes charge of his first assignment on board the USS Keeling — codename: Greyhound. His mission is to lead an international convoy of 37 Allied ships across the treacherous North Atlantic to Liverpool, all the while evading the “wolfpack” of German U-boats.
TOM HANKS HAS made a career out of playing ordinary, decent men placed in situations of extraordinary duress, be it in space (Apollo 13), Normandy (Saving Private Ryan), Somalian waters (Captain Phillips) or Al’s Toy Barn (Toy Story 2). This time round he is World War II US naval commander Ernest Krause, leading a 37-ship convoy of ships ferrying troops and supplies across an area in the Mid-atlantic dubbed The Black Pit because it went beyond the range of air cover. Adapted from C.S. Forester’s novel The Good Shepherd with Hanks himself on screenwriting duties, Greyhound sits firmly in the wheelhouse of his previous World War II missions as a producer, Band Of Brothers and The Pacific, in its sincerity and respect for the subject matter, but between decent set-pieces and fascinating insights into naval tactics and minutiae, it lacks the characterisation or depths to make it truly memorable.
After an-on-the nose prologue and a flashback to Krause sharing Christmas presents with girlfriend Evie (Elisabeth Shue) — she gets a dopey Christmas decoration, he gets monogrammed slippers — the film throws us into the heat of the battle, with Krause and his crew immediately fending off an attack from a German U-boat. Not spoon-feeding the audience, Hanks’ script admirably throws a lot of naval jargon at you and hopes you’ll stay afloat. This sustained action sequence sets the template for the action to follow — close-ups of Hanks looking out of a window, tumultuous CG sea, lots of scurrying around tight stations and a percussive, insistent score which includes
a whiny musical motif every time a German sub appears — but it feels fresh to have the cat-andmouse antics of a ship-versus-sub chess game played out above water for a change. And don’t worry, Greyhound does have the ping! ping! ping! sounds due any World War II movie set on the high seas.
The subsequent action plays out over the next 24 hours as Krause and co have to escort the convoy to Liverpool. Rather than overblown heroics, the focus here is on the day-to-day realities faced by these men. So, we get faulty equipment (windscreen wipers, sonar), a fuel and depth charge shortage, an oil tanker about to blow and a near-collision with a U-boat. You can see the effect Hanks and director Aaron Schneider, whose last directorial effort was 2009’s Get Low, are going for — an immersive, no-context tour-of-duty on board a besieged warship — but it doesn’t have the filmmaking excitement of, say, Das Boot. You rarely feel Hanks et al are actually at sea, and the film lacks the tactile texture to make the interior of the ship a character in itself.
Still, there are telling top shots of the Usversus-germany battle that graphically bring the combat to life — at one point the camera heads dramatically from the battle to sweeping up into the sky to see the Northern Lights. The film is peppered with telling titbits of World War II detail: the Germans use a decoy device called a ‘Pillenwerfer’ to mess with the onboard US sonar; the slick of oil that reveals they hit their sub-aqua target; the Germans taunting the Americans by hacking into the comms system (“The grey wolf is so very hungry”). There is also a hint of the different kind of war film Greyhound might have been: as Krause presides over a burial at sea, there is a distinctly human moment when the body refuses to slide gracefully into the ocean.
Indeed, it is humanity that is missing here. Characters are introduced but disappear. Hanks is surrounded by a clutch of young American actors playing various ensigns and boatswains, but none of them register in any meaningful way. Stephen Graham, as Krause’s right-hand man, similarly has little to do except draw straight lines with a ruler, but scores in a debate about whether a distress signal will reveal their frailties to the Germans. But the biggest problem is Krause himself. If the commander has inner conflicts about his decisions, neither Hanks the writer nor actor articulates them in any meaningful way. Hanks is always watchable, but Krause remains impenetrable. If the characters had been given a little more time to breathe and interact, Greyhound might have earned a 21-gun salute.