Review: Hunter Killer (2018)

Hunter Killer (2018)

Rated R for violence and some language

Score: 2 out of 5

Hunter Killer is a movie that I saw with my dad, and it is the very definition of a Movie That You See With Your Dad. It's an action thriller about the crew of an American hunter-killer submarine that, while investigating the disappearance of another sub under the Arctic ice, gets caught up in an attempt by the Russian defense minister to overthrow President Not Putin and start a war with the West -- an old-fashioned, '80s/'90s-style, pre-9/11 "modern war" movie that feels like it could've been written by the late Tom Clancy. Barring some topical references to Russian expansionism in the last decade (and a very not-topical US President who's clearly based on Hillary Clinton; you can tell this movie was shot in 2016), it feels like a movie they could've made twenty years ago. Unfortunately, it's not a very good example of that genre, feeling like one of the many ripoffs of Clancy that have proliferated over the years (it was, in fact, based on the novel Firing Point by Don Keith and George Wallace). The only things that liven it up are the action scenes at the beginning and end, with the story being a mess and the characters being mostly flat and uninteresting such that, when something wasn't blowing up on screen, I was honestly falling asleep -- something I almost never do when I go to see even some truly awful movies. I wholly understand nostalgia for the old days of summer blockbusters, back when not every big movie had to launch or be part of a franchise capable of supporting an entire cinematic universe of sequels and spinoffs, a mindset that has killed a whole bunch of worthy genres from romantic comedies to police procedurals. But this movie is a reminder of the flip side of that era, a throwback to bad '90s military action movies that were long on posturing but short on much to back it up.

There is a large bunch of talented actors in the cast. Gerard Butler plays the submarine's ruggedly handsome and take-charge captain Commander Joe Glass, Michael Nyqvist is the captain of a Russian sub that was attacked during the coup, Gary Oldman is the US admiral overseeing everything from Washington, Toby Stephens plays the leader of the Navy SEAL team sent to rescue Not Putin, and Linda Cardellini is... well, I can't really figure out what the point of her NSA analyst character was. But the real star of the show here is the USS Arkansas. The titular hunter-killer submarine is the only "character" that I really cared about, brought to life with detailed interior sets and a full-scale exterior model that was convincing enough that I thought they actually managed to finagle a sub from the US Navy to film some establishing shots of for a few days. The ship's technology, its corridors, its dents and dings, its weapons, its hull leaks, everything about it was given a loving focus that managed to get even me, somebody who doesn't consider himself much of a military buff, invested in its travails and wanting to see it kick tons of bad guy ass and make plenty of narrow escapes, which it gets plenty of opportunities to do over the course of the film. While the points where the film switched to CGI were obvious, the action scenes here were good enough to snap my attention right back to the screen no matter how ridiculous they could get. This movie was produced by Neal H. Moritz, the man behind the Fast and the Furious franchise among many other high-octane action and horror films, and for all that's wrong with it, I have to admit that, when this film is on, it boasts the trademark energy that is his stock in trade.

However, you may notice that I've been treating the plot and characters here as afterthoughts, not even giving my usual paragraph-long plot rundown, and there is a good reason for that. The people in this are almost entirely one-dimensional, with Butler's protagonist barely getting much semblance of an arc and other characters not getting even that. They're action figures, not characters, and neither the director nor the cast do much to elevate them above what you get in the script. The only thing they did right was find an ingenious way around the fact that Butler, like the action heroes of yesteryear, can never seem to cover up his Scottish accent and convincingly play an American. Unfortunately, they did so by populating the film with some of the worst Russian accents I've ever heard in a movie, the worst of all being Michael Nyqvist (in one of the poor guy's final roles filmed before he died in 2017) not even bothering and just using what sounds like his Swedish accent. The plot here is mostly junk, split into two seemingly unrelated stories about the sub crew and a SEAL team that fit together jarringly even after they come together in the second half of the film, almost like this was two different movies held in one piece with Superglue. Having admittedly never read the book, it felt like a lot of important character development, on the part of the sub crew, the SEALs, the people in Washington, and the villains alike, got left on the cutting room floor in order to cut this movie down to a manageable two-hour runtime. The result was uninteresting lead characters, a villain who was as dull as dishwater, and a series of twist and turns that I just couldn't bring myself to care about.

The Bottom Line

Somebody nostalgic for these sorts of movies that "they don't make like they used to" might enjoy this (hell, my dad loved it), as will military enthusiasts watching it for the hardware and weapons porn. For me, however, it was just a bad reminder of some of the other sorts of movies that the modern blockbuster landscape swept away, the plodding, low-rent thrillers that did little to thrill outside of a handful of moments.