Butler's Cinema Scene

Jude Law as a treasure-hunting submarine captain

“BLACK SEA” My rating: B- 

115 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Black Sea” is preposterous, but hugely entertaining.

This latest from director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) is a claustrophobic heist movie about a bunch of down-on-their-luck salvage operators who buy a rusty old Soviet sub and use it to locate and loot a German U-Boat that sank during World War II with millions in gold ingots aboard.

Jude Law stars as Robinson, who just lost his job working for a big international salvage company. His long absences at sea pretty much ruined his marriage, and he’s got nothing to live for. So when a well-suited mover-and-shaker (Scoot McNairy) plays intermediary between Robinson and a rich dude willing to bankroll the project, our man is all too ready to bite.

He assembles a crew of old salts, half Russian and half British, who take no time at all to be at each other’s throats. It doesn’t help that one of the Brits, a deep sea diver played by Ben Mendelsohn, is a paranoid crazy who gets it in his head that if he can kill off a few of his crewmates, that’ll leave more gold for the survivors.

Scoot McNairy

The project is complicated by the fact that the U-boat rests underneath the Russian navy’s training lanes, meaning that once the scavengers go down they cannot surface.  They’ll be spotted and the gold confiscated.

The retrieval of the bullion is nail-biting stuff executed 90 meters below the surface. And once the treasure is theirs, things don’t get any easier.

For one thing, Robinson goes off the rails, taking risks with everyone’s lives to ensure they get to shore with the loot and using a pistol to maintain his authority. He’s like Bogart in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “The Caine Mutiny.”

And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that their old boat is a leaky affair that might just be their coffin.

Silly, but diverting.

| Robert W. Butler