U-571 Review
By Joe Lozito
Sub Par
Maybe there have been enough submarine movies. Between "Das Boot", "Crimson Tide", "Run Silent, Run Deep" and "The Hunt for Red October", the submarine genre has pretty much been given its due. There's only so much you can do with a group of men confined to a tiny, hot, damp metal space.
In "U-571", writer-director Jonathan Mostow's contribution to the sub genre, the men in the U-boat of the title are being chased by the same German Destroyer throughout the film. The ship can only drop depth charges and the sub can only hope to avoid them. That's the majority of the plot. The threat feels very familiar and so does the strategy to avoid it.
Mr. Mostow, who also wrote and directed the far superior Kurt Russell thriller "Breakdown", has clearly done his homework. There are a lot of nice tidbits strewn throughout the film (the rattle of the sub's hull from a depth charge can crack a man's spine!) but there is no story to latch on to. The plot ostensibly follows the men on their mission to steal the German Enigma code machine. While the historical inaccuracy of the plot is not a major issue (the Enigma was captured by several different expeditions - most of them British), the film needs something more to make it interesting and different.
Mr. Mostow has assembled a salty crew - Harvey Keitel, Bill Paxton, and even Jon Bon Jovi join Matthew McConaughey as the untested Captain Tyler - but their characters are fairly interchangeable. We have to believe that the sub can hold together under the strain of 200 meters of water strictly by the will of its young Captain. Unfortunately, Mr. McConaughey's character arc is so predetermined that his actions and revelations, like the film, hold little water.
