Black Water (2018)
Some secrets never surface.
Van Damme and Lundgren, ready to kick some butt still. Some days just beg to be given a great, action packed movie, and two old-timey action heroes is usually a solid bet to at least get some mediocre action even in today’s movie standards. In all honesty though, you get past the cover art and quickly realize it’s more like one of those “impossible prison” movies, but I don’t care as long as I get some action. What do you get when you combine a clandestine site with a submarine? Tonight’s movie is Black Water.
I may have spoiled the premise there a bit - but yeah, that’s the plot. It starts off very secret prison, flashes back into a cop/spy sort of movie, then jumps back into the impossible prison movie. “Impossible prison” of course being that sort of “genius unescapable prison” archetype that we all know - or at least I know and have seen a few times. This time, the option throws back to a few others and opts for the Submarine as a backdrop - providing plenty of close quarters claustrophobic action! One would expect this might work better as a horror premise in all honesty, but it’s not unheard of for action flicks either. From the viewer end, we get to spend a lot of time wondering just what it is everyone is fighting over - some sort of USB and Dongle to unlock it, but we won’t actually get told what this mcguffin is for until probably at least the halfway point (it’s somewhat hard to judge time in this flick). In the meantime, the plot is pretty easy to follow on paper - someone is a good guy, someone is a traitor, and the body count is going to be pretty high one way or the other.
Espionage is rather light here - yeah, there’s some banter and “get into their head to out think them” moments, but largely it feels far less like a fancy CIA spy flick then it does a general action movie on a submarine. I’m perfectly fine with this - most the chatty scenes still do something to provide some amount of excitement, be it action that’s cut to in the background, or some form of gathering tensions so that it doesn’t grind completely to a halt even if at times it really does for a moment. The sub ends up feeling small in multiple ways here - small as in spacious during scenes which works well for adding that extra feeling of containment, but also small as in tiny overall layout, as it only ever feels like people are in one of two hallways, and three potential rooms. It works out for keeping the action running, but I could see where some might get bored with the setting even if it is decently played with for story reasons instead of simply just being a submarine everything happens to be on. Honestly, it might not excel at being the best submarine movie out there, since it’s more about the action contained within then an actual submarine movie - but it does well enough for itself.
The plot goes pretty decent too. Part of the feeling of quickness might be due to so much of the internal parts of a sub looking so similar, some might be the fact the movie isn’t that long anyways - an hour forty five. It’s slowest at it’s start while things are getting set up - particularly the semi-montage of getting from the intro action into the actual sub - but when it hits the sub things continue at a decent feeling pace after things turn on. It’s not bad, most people would probably be fine with it and not get too bored - at the very least by the story on display. Actors take the brunt of the rest of it, and that’s a bit of a mixed bag. I’ll be honest, both our lead action heroes here are getting up there in age, and I don’t think I’ve seen one that’s starting to look it more than Van Damme (although there are times when Stallone and Arnold can appear rather older as well compared to what they used to look like). As far as action goes, they still hold up pretty well - even if I’m sure a lot of the more complex stuff is probably stunt actors, as is usually the case with stars in studios. As far as acting chops, they hold up pretty well too, although there are a few moments where Van Damme can come off perhaps a little bit too tired for this stuff, although it’s largely more a facial expression than a full body exhaustion sort of look. As far as Van Damme in bed with some gorgeous young thing partner in the flashback? Probably the least believable part in the movie - and I guess that actually is somewhat props for the rest of the movie.
Insert “I wish X would stare at me like that” joke.
There are more actors in the movie then just those two however, and it’s very much a mixed bag. I wouldn’t necessarily call anyone excellent, although Lundgreen surely comes off as the most fun. Some of the agent types act pretty well as well - and some for the most part the rest of the cast is good enough with a few sides coming in as “meh whatever” sorts of plays - nothing really bad, but not a whole lot impressive either. Our female lead at the start does a decent enough job, and the female lead in the rest of the movie gives me a bit of a Megan Fox in her early days impression. She’s not bad, not really super-standout, and can feel a bit like it was approached as “get someone hot” who kind of just works out for the movie even if her character itself perhaps isn’t the most well written. She does pretty good either way, including in the fights she’s involved with - although I was worried at one point about a prolonged fight where I felt for sure they were going to end up “damsel in distress” cliche engaging, but they spun it around and she did exactly what I was yelling at her character on the screen to do. Props for that.
The actual characters fit what they are supposed to be on the screen - but I wouldn’t necessarily say the excel at more than that. Van Damme plays the character like he’s some agent man whose trained, but he doesn’t come off as “I’ve been living and breathing competition three gun” John Wick by any means. Even the bad guys, who are more decked out costume wise and weapon wise, don’t end up really excelling at having any large amounts of depth, and by the end of the movie the bad guy motivation literally ends up being as shallow as “get that money!” The costume department gets to hang out in the “good but not standing out” department here as well, given that it’s a modern time thing so the fanciest thing you’ll see is a few tac vests being worn by the baddies or the sub-crew uniforms that make them feel like a submarine crew. The setting itself looks believable submarine, although perhaps not so much in those exterior underwater shots - but hey, not everyone can get a real submarine to zip about underwater while they have some good quality cameras to catch it all right?
Audio is decent here. It might not have any ear worms in the soundtrack that I picked out while listening, but it was entertaining and, dare I say it, comical at times. At one point it evoked the image of a circus during a showdown, and I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not but I still rather enjoyed it and in turn it stood out. The gunshots and ricochets and punches all come off sounding done well enough, and actor lines aren’t hard to hear with the exception of when it’s meant to be. Granted, I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit louder when passing through two doors across a hallway when it cuts to the other member of conversation at that point, but at least thematically if makes sense that the voice would suffer some muffling to feel more authentic - much like if a character is whispering it would logically be quieter then the guy yelling over gunfire. That said, mostly everything here is easy to hear and doesn’t require subtitles to catch - even if having them on is my usual MO for movie watching.
Freeze frames can provide such great facial expressions.
You want an action prison-escape movie based on a submarine? This is a pretty good option. It’s violent, but not necessarily in the blood and guts sort of way. It attempts to be sexy a few times, and largely ends up being either weird or unnecessary when it does - and not enough is there or is it explicit in any way that it would bother most people. If you just want fun action it fits the bill pretty good for a wide audience, although do keep in mind that violence and language is the main possible contributors in here for that R rating, and my tolerance levels of violence at this point could be way off point compared to other folks.