Movie Reviews

I should've known that the silly name and akward casting would've added up to a sub-par movie (get it... sub-par, and it's a movie about a sub... aren't I clever?)

K-19: The Widowmaker is not a horribly bad movie, it's just a really bland movie. Nothing really exciting happens (though the music and soundtrack would seem to be trying to indicate otherwise). The movie is chock-full of the usual submarine-movie conflicts: water leaks, faulty guages, hull-breaches, torpedo malfunctions, etc. And the worst part is that the majority of these are not even real dangers, they're just relentless drills ordered on the crew by Harrison Ford's hard-ass captain-character.

And what's up with Harrison Ford (not to mention Liam Neeson, as well) playing a Russian submarine captain, anyway? Only thing I can think of is that the producers knew the story was fairly weak, so they needed some big names to draw an audience. Harrison Ford with a Russian accent was not at all convincing: it was just Harrison Ford with a Russian accent (and it wasn't even a consistent accent... in fact, none of the accents throughout the film were consistent. There were moments when it seemed to me that some lines of dialogue were spoken with a blatently American twang).

Anyway, like I said, it wasn't a horrible movie. Things did get kind of interesting near the end when the crew had to deal with the sub's malfunctioning nuclear reactor (and with the K-19 being the USSR's first nuclear submarine, no one on board really knew what to do about it). But even this bit seemed to drag on a little too long.

I hear Das Boot is supposed to be the "be-all-and-end-all" of submarine movies. I guess I'll have to watch that one soon...