I went into “Hunter Killer” expecting a cheesy, overdone military action flick rife with explosions. But, while parts of the film were cheesy and there certainly were a lot of explosions, I found the movie to be much better than I was expecting.
The film pulls off something I wasn’t sure it would be able to do. It makes underwater battles and shots of slow-moving, windowless submarines exciting and suspenseful. Using a combination of tight shots of the interior of the bridge and dark underwater angles, the film succeeded in making me genuinely concerned for the fate of the USS Arkansas and her crew.
Furthermore, the film sets up its plot in such a way that makes the film about more than just one submarine. In many ways, the film is a cliché. It tells the story of a new unproven sub captain who never went to captain school and learned from experience working on submarines instead.
He starts off unpopular with the crew, but then gains their respect through a series of daring and unconventional maneuvers and techniques — fairly generic military movie character development. But when it comes to plot, the movie was so much more than I was expecting. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the story has its share of mystery, and that it managed to put the fate of the whole world on one submarine and a handful of soldiers.
The characters were, like I said, fairly generic. Gerard Butler played the new captain who earned the respect of his previously begrudging crew, and Gary Oldman played the obligatory angry Secretary of Defense who never stopped trying to turn the situation into a bigger problem. They both delivered fine performances, but neither were anything special. The one performance I was impressed with came from Michael Nyqvist, who played Butler’s counterpart captain in the Russian navy. His stoicism and the complexity of his character made for the one performance in the film that I wasn’t expecting, but that caught me off guard in all the right ways. Nyqvist unfortunately died last year after his parts in the film were complete but well before the movie was released. He took a film that could’ve been interesting on its own and made it into something better.
Another thing I wasn’t expecting from this film was its ability to show the plot from several different vantage points. When I first read about a new submarine film coming out, I was expecting something along the lines of “Phantom,” where most of the film takes place inside the sub itself. What I got instead was a film that depicted its story from every angle. The camera showed the crisis room with the president. It showed the bridges of the Russian ships. It took the audience to a room with the Russian president. It showed underwater shootouts, and it showed soldiers on the ground. Sometimes, the claustrophobic shots and static camera can work for a film, but I was pleasantly surprised with the direction director Donovan Marsh took with this movie.
All things considered, I found “Hunter Killer” to be much better than I thought it was going to be. It still wasn’t a great film by any means, but it wasn’t as stupid as its premise led me to believe. It’s a fun, patriotic action movie set against all the crazy technological weaponry the modern military has to offer. It was cool. And I’d definitely say it’s worth a watch.