K-19: The Widowmaker Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)July 15th, 2002
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Submarine films - I don't know why they bother making them anymore. I mean, where do you go after Das Boot? Since then, the quality keeps decreasing with the release of each high-profile sub flick. The Hunt For Red October was good, Crimson Tide and U-571 were tolerable (honestly, how seriously can you take a film with Jon Bon Jovi?), and now K-19: The Widowmaker continues the downward trend by being staggeringly unimpressive. Part of me was hoping the film would be about someone's attempt to climb the world's 19th biggest mountain instead of underwater vehicles.
The connection to October doesn't end with the submarine similarities. Widowmaker star Harrison Ford eventually took over the Jack Ryan role originated by Alec Baldwin in October, and he passed on continuing the Ryan legacy in The Sum Of All Fears so he could make Widowmaker. Additionally, Ford and co-star Liam Neeson are two of Hollywood's most sleep-inducing and overrated stars, charting somewhere near Denzel Washington on the Bore-O-Meter. Washington, of course, was the star of Crimson Tide, but as bland as he is, his chemistry with Gene Hackman was much, much better than what we get from zombies Ford and Neeson.
Actually, the Fears connection doesn't end there. Both films open with high-tension scenes that make it seem like the world is only seconds away from breaking out into old school-style nuclear war. This time, we see a bunch of Soviet seamen scrambling around a sub in what turns out to be a simulation drill. K-19, a brand-new, state-of-the-art nuclear wonder the likes of which the world has never seen, has yet to leave the dock but has already claimed ten lives during its construction (hence its nickname - "the Widowmaker").
It's 1961 and the drill is a failure because of the inexperience of the crew as well as the sub's general state of unreadiness. Captain Michael Polenin (Neeson, The Phantom Menace) knows both ship and crew need more time before they begin their mission to patrol the U.S. coast between New York and Washington, but his superiors insist not only on going ahead with the mission, but they also bust Polenin down to Executive Officer and bring Captain Alexi Vostrikov (Ford, What Lies Beneath) aboard.
We know things won't go smoothly because 1) the champagne bottle doesn't break during the official christening ceremony, and 2) it's a big Hollywood film. There are two major plotlines in Widowmaker that eventually converge into one. Vostrikov married into a powerful Communist Party family and tries to be a hard-ass just to show he really earned his stripes like everyone else. Then there's the trouble with the reactor coolant. If the core reaches 1000F, the bus blows up. Whoops, I mean the sub blows up. Anyway, not only would an explosion kill everyone aboard and destroy the pride of the Soviet fleet, it would also likely trigger World War III.
Widowmaker, which is based on a events that actually happened but were kept under wraps until the collapse of Communism, is a nice companion piece to Thirteen Days as far as Cold War history goes. I don't think either of them are particularly entertaining, but I probably would have enjoyed watching them as an alternative to reading about them if I were still a high school student. The film is even more disappointing, since I was expecting more from director Kathryn Bigelow, whose last big-screen offering was the enjoyable (and James Cameron-produced) Strange Days. Since then, she helmed a handful of great Homicide episodes and made the much less effect-and-testosterone-heavy The Weight Of Water (due in theatres at the end of this year).
Acting-wise, I have trouble getting behind a film populated by British and American actors trying to sound Russian but managing to sound only like what Brits and Americans think Russians sound like when they speak English (which is slightly less realistic than Boris Badenov). And even those accents are sporadic, at best. The actual survivors were reportedly so furious over the Americanized portrayal of clueless, drunken Russians, they forced the filmmakers to change the names of the characters to fictitious monikers. And that, my friends, is not the sign of a quality film.
1:58 - PG-13 for disturbing images
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