Hunter Killer
starring Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini and Toby Stephens
written by Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss
directed by Donovan Marsh
Rating: ♦♦◊◊◊
Based on the book Firing Point by Don Keith and George Wallace (Signet, 2012), Hunter Killer is an action thriller about an American submarine crew and a group of Navy SEALS who rescue the captured Russian President from a coup. I didn’t know anything about it when I rented the DVD except what I could glean from the pictures on the box. I was hoping for an exciting diversion like The Hunt for Red October (1990, starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, directed by John McTiernan), but it wasn’t like that. I mean, it didn’t rise to that level of performance.
The film starts off with an American attack submarine, the USS Tampa Bay, clandestinely following and shadowing a Russian sub, Konek, in the Arctic waters near the military zone of the Kola Peninsula. Murmansk is their big port there. Suddenly, the Russian sub explodes. The Tampa Bay hears torpedoes in the water, but they didn’t fire them. Someone else sunk the Russian warship! But who? It turns out that a coup d’état is under way in Russia led by the Minister of Defense, Admiral Dmitriy Durov (Mikhail Gorevoy) who is deliberately trying to foment a war with the West because he thinks it’s inevitable and he just wants to get on with it. Admiral Durov immediately starts spinning the story as an unprovoked attack by the U.S. on the Konek. Meanwhile the Americans in Washington know damn well they didn’t fire on the Russian sub, and they’re scrambling trying to figure out what the hell is going on before it’s too late to avoid an all-out war.
So, they decide to air drop a small SEAL team near Murmansk to penetrate the base and spy things out. That’s incredible. In the movies Americans can pretend that something like that is actually really possible. Anyway, so that’s what they do. The SEAL team takes up an observation post on the shores of a Russian Navy base and using high-powered lenses they manage to see Russian President Nicolai Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko) under detention by armed Russian troops. Aha! A coup is in progress! But what to do about it before it breaks out into all-out war?
Use the SEAL team to re-kidnap President Zakarin secret him away to safety in America, or at least aboard an American vessel. President Zakarin has never been a great friend of America, but he’s sure to be after this!
And he is.
A final thing - something that really annoyed me. Gerard Butler plays Commander Joe Glass, captain of the USS Arkansas, another U.S. sub sent into Russian waters to investigate what’s going on. Commander Glass is a bit of an unorthodox captain because the situation he’s is in so unorthodox, and because he is not a graduate of the Naval Academy. That makes him an outsider to the naval command structure. He takes his ship dangerously close into strongly guarded Russian territory. All the while, one of his subordinates, Lieutenant Commander Brian Edwards (Carter MacIntyre) is whining about how unconventional Commander Glass’s actions are, and how he is violating protocol, and possibly threatening American national security. It got so tiresome that I wondered if the story would include a submarine mutiny, led by the Executive Officer of the Arkansas, like Denzel Washington squaring off against his superior, Gene Hackman, in the 1995 submarine movie Crimson Tide (directed by Tony Scott). It didn’t come to that, but I sometimes thought that might make a better story than the one I was watching.