Created for a world in which our President and the Russian President weren’t BFFs, Hunter Killer is an absurd and occasionally fun military thriller full of grandstanding speeches and special effects that are just good enough. Gerard Butler stars as the stone-faced Joe Glass, the commanding officer of the USS Arkansas who is pulled out of retirement precisely because he’s an out of the box thinker who didn’t graduate from Annapolis (or so we’re told many times in the first 20 minutes). No sir, our man came up in the Navy doing every job on a submarine.
In the film’s opening moments on an American sub, the USS Tampa Bay is shot down in Russian waters leading to high alert in Washington. Under the command of Rear Admiral John Fisk (Common) and NSA operative Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini), an elite SEAL squad is sent into Russia to monitor the situation on the ground while Joe Glass handles things underwater. Glass’ unorthodox methods which include saving a downed Russian captain (played by the late Michael Nyqvist) lead to friction at every turn and the occasional threat of a court-martial. Glass definitely doesn’t play by the Annapolis rulebook, preferring to think of Nyqvist’s Captain Sergei Andropov as a fellow sailor in his own backyard. He indeed navigates the ship through a secret passage that only a local seaman would know.
Directed by Donovan Marsh from a script by Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss, Hunter Killer is an old-fashioned throwback, the kind of 90s action picture Steven Seagal might have starred in. It’s a battle of brash egos on land and in the sea that seems curiously dated even when it tries to provide a modern twist. Perhaps it’s the filmmaker’s bad fortune that the film was shot in a pre-Trump era and they made the decision to cast a Hillary Clinton look-a-like (Caroline Goodall) in the role of US President Ilene Dover. The Russians are far more absurd, speaking in perfect English to avoid using subtitles while Russian President Zakarin (Alexader Diachenko) barely looks Russian.
Hunter Killer, despite its excessive running time, does provide some delight if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Despite overstaying its welcome through one absurd action sequence after another, it knows exactly what it is: an action movie your uncle would have liked after receiving on VHS from Columbia House. It’s just skillful enough to keep one engaged as we witness otherwise dull archetypes escape one tense situation after another. As a commentary on geopolitics, it’s tame enough to barely offend Vladimir Putin and disposable enough that you can easily imagine the Blu-ray floating in one of those $5 discount bins.
Hunter Killer is now in wide release.