Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars
Bottom Line: Ridiculous premise. Cliches galore. Lots of lose ends. Some moderately cool submarine action.
Pretend for a second that you are the U.S. Navy. For years, you have been overshadowed by your much cooler brothers: The Air Force with all their cool gadgets and space stuff, the Marines with their oorah and general bad-assedness, heck, even the Army has drones and cyber-security and whatnot! Sure, the Navy has their SEALs, but even if you asked people what branch the Navy SEALs belonged to they’d probably say Marines. What’s a poor Navy to do to up their cred? Create “Hunter Killer” would be my guess because this is the type of movie you get when a bunch of people who think it would be cool to make a movie but have no idea how to make a movie. Here is a conversation that I assumed happened between the Navy and the editor and director of this movie:
Navy: You know what would be cool? Let’s shoot a scene where it shows the submarine submerging quickly and all the crewmen on the bridge are shown tilted in order to stay upright since the submarine is going down at a steep angle!
Director: Hey, that’s pretty neat! I never knew that happened. We will film that!
Editor: I’ll throw these 5 seconds in showing them all tilt as the submarine starts its dive.
Navy: Yeah, but what if we throw in more? People are talking and stuff when this happens. Lets have some dialogue while they’re all tilted.
Director: Ooh, yeah, I like it! I’ll film these lines with them both standing tilted and various other ways.
Editor: Um, that’s probably unnecessary and will look a little weird, but I see where you’re coming from. We’ll throw in the next few lines with them tilted.
Navy: And what if we cut away to some other action happening in the sub to show what other people are doing while the sub is diving and then cut back to everyone tilted? And get this, what if we show them like that for the entire length it takes for the submarine to actually dive that far?
Director: You have given me money so I will do this thing you ask of me!
Editor: *head explodes*
Yes, that is an actual scene in the movie. Add to that a bucket full of Navy cliches and dubious plot points and what you have is a real flop of a film. The movie starts with a U.S. submarine being blown up by a rogue Russian submarine for reasons that are never really explained except for the fact that now the U.S. needs to send another submarine to see what happened to their missing sub. It basically gets more preposterous from there. Treaties are broken with abandon. Plots are hatched with little forethought. It’s a complete mess of a movie.
There are a bunch of submarine movies that are pretty awesome. This is not one of them. Go rent “Hunt For Red October” or “Crimson Tide” or “Yellow Submarine” rather than “Hunter Killer” if you have a submarine fix that needs sating.