K-19: The Widowmaker.

Review #1258: K-19: The Widowmaker.

Cast: 
Harrison Ford (Captain 2nd Rank Alexei Vostrikov), Liam Neeson (Captain 3rd Rank Mikhail "Misha" Polenin), Peter Sarsgaard (Lieutenant Vadim Radtchenko), Joss Ackland (Marshal Zolentsov), John Shrapnel (Admiral Bratyeev), Donald Sumpter (Captain 3rd Rank Gennadi Savran), Tim Woodward (Vice-Admiral Konstantin Partonov), Steve Nicolson (Captain 3rd Rank Yuri Demichev), Ravil Isyanov (Captain 3rd Rank Igor Suslov), Christian Camargo (Petty Officer Pavel Loktev), and George Anton (Captain-Lieutenant Konstantin Poliansky) Directed and Produced by Kathryn Bigelow.

Review: 
I could make up a sentence about how tense submarine dramas can be when done right, but I can't really say I have watched many of them. Sure, I have watched films with submarines before (like Fantastic Voyage), but the only submarine film I have covered was The Hunt for Red October (1990). Honestly, the urge to watch this film has never really been high, but sometimes you just have to get rid of the non-obvious picks so it never ever needs to linger on the shelf uncovered, especially for such a meh month like August. Is there anything interesting one could say about this film? Well...at least you can see the ambition (i.e money spent) jump at you on screen. As annoying as it may seem to note its box office failure (making only $65 million on a $90 million budget, with one production company being the National Geographic Society), it does become evident not too long into its run-time why this wasn't a big hit. Ford and Neeson can only do so much with a film that just does the bare minimum with garnering tense entertainment. It weebles and wobbles for 138 minutes, playing a game of tension and reaching stalemate more times than garnering overall victory. There are other ways of spending two hours, and this ranks as a middling option. One can be really wishy-washy about a film that just isn't energetic enough to really heap praise over nor crow about.

One thing I can note is the fact that the set of the sub is actually the same size of the real K-19 sub this film is loosely adapting from, complete with narrow corridors. Even if the film isn't completely accurate to historical facts involving the real K-19 (whose nickname upon the accident was actually Hiroshima), at least it can be said that this isn't a complete embarrassment to the real crew members that were on the ship, who had objected to the initial script (with the resulting script revisions also resulting in changing the names of the crew). At least the sub action seems pretty authentic, which can go hand in hand with the radiation effects. Ford and Neeson play off each other fairly well with what they are given - you may not get to really know these two beyond just being the heads on a cursed ship, but at least they seem fairly interested to be there - with ensuing attempts at Russian accents seeming okay. The other members of the cast are fine, if not really anything to write home about more than a sentence or two, with Sarsgaard showing fair promise at least. If one knows about a historical event (and its participants) more than just a search on the Internet, does it help in the enjoyment (or the opposite) of the film adaptation? It certainly seems a bit interesting to take a subject that didn't really have much notoriety due to the crew not being able to speak on the matter for decades and try to make something worthy for film, for better or worse. There isn't any shoehorned characters there for the sake of being there, and it holds itself up as a film without being too contrived even during its climax and epilogue scene. If the film makes you care what could happen to these characters in the sub, then it surely has done the job of making worthy entertainment. If the shoe fits, surely you could have a fine time with this one. If it doesn't do that (as is the case with me), try another film.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.