Hunter Killer (2018)
Directed by Donovan Marsh
Untested American submarine commander, Capt. Joe Glass of the USS Arkansas, is on the hunt for a U.S. sub in distress in the Arctic Ocean. He soon learns a secret Russian coup is in the offing, a conspiracy that threatens to dismantle the world order. With crew and country on the line, Glass must coordinate with an elite group of Navy SEALs to sneak through enemy waters, rescue the kidnapped Russian president, and hopefully prevent World War III.
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What critics compared Hunter Killer to
The best submarine films, The Hunt for Red October , Das Boot , were military stories but performance driven.
The last notable entries in the genre were "The Hunt for Red October" (1990), "U-571" (2000) and "K19: The Widowmaker" (2002).
Director Marsh keeps things moving, stages some impressive actions sequences (I especially liked the SEALs who are so badass that they jump right into a nasty thunderstorm), and even seems to care to a degree about making the submarine experience feel authentic, as much as films like Crimson Tide or The Hunt for Red October feel (though this film is nowhere near as good as those, for the record).
I mean, for starters, Hunter Killer is like a remake of The Hunt for Red October if Michael Bay directed it, except not even Michael Bay, who at least evinces a certain level of technical flair even if it is almost always deployed in the most painfully jingoistic and propagandistic ways.
It’s like “The Hunt for Red October” if re-written by a scribe who just suffered a serious head blow.
(No, not even Crimson Tide or The Hunt for Red October.)
Another piece to this overly complicated puzzle is that when Glass arrives to the scene of the initial joint attack, he discovers that three crew members are still alive in the Russian sub, including the captain, Andropov (the late Michael Nyqvist, best known for being the male lead in the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films), who becomes key to the American’s mission.