K-19: The Widowmaker

What’s the Story?

The setting is the USSR in 1961, at the height of the cold war. "Comrade Captain" Polenin (Liam Neeson) is the honorable and beloved leader of the Navy's flagship, a zillion-dollar nuclear-powered submarine. Moscow is eager to get it out onto the water, but Polenin says it is not ready. So, he is replaced by taciturn tough guy Captain Vostrikov (Harrison Ford). Vostrikov takes the sub out to complete its mission: to conduct a missile test to send a signal to the U.S. But Polenin's concerns about eh sub are proven when the K-19's cooling system begins to leak. The crew must put their own lives on the line to prevent a detonation of the ship's reactor, which could start another world war.

Is It Any Good?

It's a bad sign when a movie can't make up its mind between two titles and just goes with both of them. In the case of K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER, that is an accurate indicator of its ambivalent, pretentious, inflated, and heavy-handed tone. It begins with that dreaded signal of fake profundity, the notice that what we are about to see is "inspired by real events." That all too often means that we will see a lot of fake human drama around some real-life challenge or turning point. And what that means in this case is a tired retelling of the submarine movie conventions that we have seen in much better form in movies like The Hunt for Red October and even potboilers like Crimson Tide.

Neeson and Sarsgaard do their best, but Ford, in trying to make his character complex, just makes him muddled. Director Kathryn Bigelow has a marvelous fluidity in maneuvering the camera within the tightly confined spaces, but her gifts are best used with action (as in the under-rated Point Break), not tension, which is what is called for here. The movie effectively conveys the decay of petty bureaucracy, but it is slow and too long. And it has one of the worst uses of music in years, all plinking balalaikas, syrupy strings, and, in the moments of greatest peril, angelic choirs, like a Carol Burnett Show parody of a WWII-era propaganda film. And then there is the old-age make-up in the last scene, which is just silly.