A Sinking Feeling
Written: Jul 22 '02 (Updated Jul 22 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some parts are tense and hold your attention
Cons: Tends to drag on; ending unnecessary
The Bottom Line: All in all, a good effort by director Kathryn Bigelow, but fails to hit the mark.
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| jentnews's Full Review: K-19: The Widowmaker |
Let me begin by saying that I did NOT want to see K-19: The Widowmaker this weekend. I would have much rather seen Road to Perdition, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But after much pleading from my fiance, we went to see this action flick with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. I expected to be thoroughly bored the entire time. I was half-right - the movie had its bright spots, but also its low points.
The Plot: K-19 is a 2 1/2-hour movie set on a Russian submarine at the apex of the Cold War. The monstrous sub is supposed to go to the North Pole and test-fire a nuclear missile, so much the better to strike fear into the hearts of Americans. So the powers-that-be in the Communist Party are pretty anxious to get it out to sea. But the sub's captain, Polenin (Neeson), refuses, saying that a few more things need to be done before it's safe to use. Well, the big cheeses are none too happy with this behavior, and appoint a guy named Vostrikov (Ford) to command K-19, with Polenin as his right-hand man.
This is where the trouble starts. Vostrikov is much stricter on his men than Polenin was, forcing them to run grueling emergency drills every day and turn the sub at scary angles. Polenin was more of a friend to the soldiers, and naturally he and Vostrikov clash several times throughout the movie. It doesn't help matters when the Party orders the K-19 crew to do some patrolling off the U.S. coast, in addition to their original mission.
So when coolant begins to leak in the sub's nuclear reactor - threatening to blow the whole thing to kingdom come, and take some Americans with them, possibly starting a nuclear war - these tensions are heightened. Plus, the whole crew must come together to make the dangerous repair and get everyone home safely. But, as is the case in most of these type movies, fixing the leak isn't as easy as everyone thinks, and K-19 threatens to become a death mission.
What I Think: K-19 is not a bad movie, as far as action movies go. There were occasional tense moments, and I found myself on the edge of my seat more than once. It's also interesting to watch Polenin grow progressively more exasperated with Vostrikov, while Vostrikov becomes even more of a taskmaster, performing dangerous tests that threaten to break the sub in half. Neeson and Ford also do their Russian accents surprisingly well, and many of the crewmembers are bona fide Russians, which does nothing but help the authenticity of the film.
But we don't learn as much about the main characters as I would have liked. They say very little about Polenin's military background, and we know nothing about Vostrikov except that he's married to the daughter of a Politburo member, and that his father was in the Gulag. The other crewmembers establish their characters fairly quickly; it's readily apparent who's out to get Vostrikov, so Polenin can lead again. The other minor crewmembers remain flat and one-dimensional, so the rivalry between Polenin and Vostrikov takes center stage. And that gets boring after a while.
Standard movie cliches also abound in K-19. There's the standard bit where a crewmember pulls out a photo of a girl back home and announces that they're going to get married when the mission is over, which I found to be unoriginal and tired. (And you KNOW what happens to characters that do that.) Plus, one crewmember brings a caged mouse on the sub, and it's no surprise when the rodent goes belly-up later on.
The movie also drags on for more than necessary, ending with a short, supposedly-emotional coda a la Schindler's List, in which the surviving members of K-19 reunite and reflect on the life-changing experience they had aboard that sub. But director Kathryn Bigelow did not execute her epilogue as well as Spielberg, and the ending seems stuck-on and out of sync with the rest of the film.
K-19 is rated R, and has some strong language and graphic injury scenes (think blood). It may be disturbing for young children.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
jentnews
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Location: Texas, USA
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
A struggling writer, tryin' to make it in Texas.
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