I was late to Kevin MacDonald’s gritty and sad 2014 submarine film Black Sea. The film came out right around the time critics were started to realize that Jude Law might make a fine character actor, now that his peak years of stardom had passed and his hairline had receded. In the film, Law plays Robinson, a marine salvage expert who is first shown being fired from his job by a much younger Human Resources worker bee. With his body hunched over the chair he’s sitting in, Law exudes the weight of someone crushed by forces he can’t control. Watching the film, I frequently forgot I was watching Law because he so believably inhabited this working-class character who has lost his family to the only job he knows how to do.
Robinson has a friend who has also been laid off by the same company, who knows about a sunken German U-boat holding millions of dollars in gold out in the Black Sea. As a way to get back at their employer, Robinson and his friend put a team together to man a submarine to the U-boat and take the gold. Theirs is a ragtag group of men who are good at what they do and have been used and fired by their blandly named corporate employer, Agora. Like in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, these man have been emasculated by capitalist forces and precarity, and the promise of wealth alters their character and their judgment.
There are many twists and turns in Black Sea so I’ll say little else about the plot. Law is exceptional, and he’s supported by a first-rate cast that includes Scott McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Jodie Whitaker, and Michael Smiley.
Aden Thomas Jordan 