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Das borscht
[Photo: Paramount Pictures]
Soviet sub commander Alexi Vostrikov (Harrison Ford, who speaks with a Russian accent) confronts his second in command, Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson). |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published July 18, 2002
The story of K-19: The Widowmaker was suppressed by Russia for 30 years, and it takes nearly that long for the heroic submarine tale to get going.
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The Cold War adventure K-19: The Widowmaker causes that sinking gut feeling even before the titular submarine dives. It occurs sometime around the moment when Indiana Jones shows up sporting a Commie uniform and an accent to match.
K-19 (we'll drop the rest of that clunky title for our purposes) presents Harrison Ford at a terminally understated acting level, playing Soviet sub commander Alexi Vostrikov during a 1961 nuclear crisis. Think back to our Cold War impressions of Russians -- dry, humorless, devoid of personality, perpetually harsh -- to grasp the outline of Ford's performance. All of his intensity seems focused on remaining ramrod straight and rolling the appropriate consonants to sound like a real comrade. He can't even work up a good seethe, since Vostrikov is such a control freak.
Hardly a character to rally emotions, especially in a situation that director Kathryn Bigelow depicts with less urgency than it deserves. This 128-minute movie could be much leaner. Instead, we get familiar, repetitive underwater action, a few Caine Mutiny distractions and at least two instances when the movie could end but doesn't.
The story was suppressed by Russian intelligence for 30 years. The K-19 atomic submarine was the pride of the Soviet fleet, entrusted with a mission to fire a nuclear missile in a remote arctic region as a Cold War warning shot. During the mission, the sub's reactor coolant system malfunctioned, creating the possibility of a meltdown and thermal explosion. Eight sailors died of radiation poisoning suffered while attempting to repair the reactor. Maybe more of Bigelow's movie should have been told from their point of view.
Peter Sarsgaard is Vadim in
K-19: The Widowmaker.
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Those suicidal, heroic sequences provide the best drama in K-19. But it's a slow, methodical tension that Bigelow botches for the rest of the movie. Too many false alarms and foreshadowing taps on the reactor's temperature gauge stretch our patience as we wait for disaster to strike, then see it averted. It's fortunate that the real K-19 crew didn't suffer a catastrophe, but that doesn't inspire the knack for eccentric action Bigelow displayed in Point Break and Strange Days.
Bigelow settles for grim preliminaries that spotlight her stars. Liam Neeson plays the sub's first commander, Capt. Polenin, who is seen by Soviet leaders as too soft, because of his support for his crew. Vostrikov is assigned to take over, with Polenin as his second in command. The new commander draws a hard line with the crew, running endless training drills and firing a highly qualified reactor supervisor for taking a nap. Some of the impending problems may be his fault, which makes Ford's character even less appealing.
Christopher Kyle's screenplay dotes on each set-up, as if rising tempers, the missile firing and dangerously deep dives are the reasons for the movie to exist. It could all be told more briskly to get to the good stuff faster. Nearly an hour passes before the reactor and the K-19 crew begin overheating. The third act gives viewers something fresh with those gruesome reactor repairs and a declined offer of assistance from a U.S. Navy ship. Then a sluggish epilogue makes one long for simple end notes to discover what happened to everybody.
K-19: The Widowmaker looks like every other submarine flick since Das Boot, with Jeff Cronenweth's camera snaking through narrow corridors, then jamming into actors' faces to convey the cramped quarters. It's an effective method of making the audience feel trapped like the crew. Or maybe that feeling is just the result of the entire movie.
K-19: The Widowmaker
- Grade: C
- Director: Kathryn Bigelow
- Cast: Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Peter Sarsgaard, Joss Ackland
- Screenplay: Christopher Kyle
- Rating: PG-13; disturbing images
- Running time: 128 min.
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