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Okay, so this WWII adventure takes liberties with history, and has the Brits all up in arms because they don't get proper credit since in truth they, not the Americans, were the first ones to snatch a super-secret Enigma code machine from a Nazi submarine and thereby get a leg up on the blockade that almost ended the war before the U.S. could once again come to Europe's rescue. Big deal. It's a movie. Saving Private Ryan was fictional too, but that didn't keep it from being one of the most stirring, realistic depictions of combat ever put on celluloid. Do you think Moses looked like Charlton Heston?
Matthew McConaughey plays Lt. Andrew "Bongo" Tyler (just kidding), who finds himself commanding a handful of sailors trying to nurse an ailing hijacked U-boat through German-controlled waters when their clandestine mission goes bad. Throw in a few miracles usually seen only in the typical old-fashioned rah-rah war movie, which tries to express deadly armed conflict as uplifting, feelgood entertainment, and you've got the plot. But this is a film that achieves at least some success on the strength of its details. Now that contemporary adventures like The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide have gotten people thinking that undersea excursions are as casually appointed as the "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" ride at Disneyworld, and it's been nearly 20 years since Das Boot got nominated for six Oscars for showing what warfare in the Atlantic was really like, it's forgivable to need reminding what a perilous, alien, claustrophobic environment the pre-nuclear military submarine was.
And the only way you'll come out of the theater not feeling at least a little bit water-logged is if you walked into Love & Basketball by mistake. The opening sequence, set aboard the titular boat while its German crew plays cat-and-mouse with Allied shipping, is so relentlessly nerve-wracking you can practically smell the diesel and saltwater. McConaughey does okay (more impressive is Harvey Keitel as a career enlisted man), but frankly the stars of this movie are director Jonathan Mostow (who did the taught road-thriller Breakdown) and the people who built the submarine sets. Imagine playing an NFL game in the kitchen of a single-wide mobile home, strewn with land mines, at the bottom of a lake, and you'll start to get the idea.
Just be glad that these days Germans are contented to make cars, beer, and electric shavers. B-
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