Review of K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) by Hannibal O — 21 Aug 2008

This is a shrug of a movie. Literally all the action in the flick is comprised of drills, practices, and whatnot. There is only one sequence of genuine suspense in the entire film, but Leonard Nimoy did the scene much better in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

There are fine performances throughout the film, but they don't really have anything to do. Harrison Ford is fine as Russian Captain, he didn't really suck, but he understates nearly everything in the movie.

He keeps a single emotional level of detachment throughout the film. A major problem with the film is that every character is cut from threadbare cloth...there are no complications, no depth, no dimensions.

These are just Russian sailors on a submarine and I didn't care more about any one of them over any other sailor on that ship. The cast simply had no real depth. Now, I suppose the 'situation' that occurs was supposed to give them all depth, but frankly, we're told 4 times or more that they were all heroes, thats the new depth they have.

As for the 'situation', they're on a nuclear submarine and it shipped out too early and wasn't adequately checked out. As a result, shit happens. The most intriguing thing in the whole film came out of Liam Neeson's mouth.

An annoying thing about the script was the CONSTANT drills. I can see the value of showing 1 drill, but do we really need to see ALL THE DRILLS and do we really need to cut very very quickly through them with as much clangy noises as we can muster and an overbearing score pounding out? This isn't a bad movie and in fact its about as intriguing as the lesser documentaries on the History Channel.

I liked the film in a half-hearted way. It had a fine cast, wonderful filmmaker, was based on a true but little known incident in history. However, the story is non-cinematic...its a story about something that didn't happen (everybody didn't die, the submarine didn't explode in a nuclear blast, etc.

). This is a film about what didn't happen and why it didn't happen and if things had gone differently we could all be glowing in the dark, but it didn't happen. So overall it was an ehhh movie for me.