Continuing to circulate among the heroes of time-honored action genres — aviators (Top Gun), car racers (Days of Thunder), private detectives (The Last Boy Scout) — director Tony Scott here moves on to submariners, complete with map-and-pointer briefings, locker-room-style inspirational speeches ("Go, 'Bama!"), sonor-screen blips of incoming torpedoes, and so on. The crew members of the U.S.S. Alabama even quiz one another on the apposite Hollywood analogues (The Enemy Below, Run Silent Run Deep) to help put the current adventure in the proper perspective. In view, however, of latter-day capabilities (a printed preamble identifies the captain of a nuclear sub as the third most powerful man in the world, after the presidents of the United States and Russia), the submarine genre is on an irreversible collision course with the doomsday genre of On the Beach and Fail Safe: it steered that way as early as Ice Station Zebra and The Bedford Incident. The prolonged contemplation of the unthinkable places the movie, by Hollywood's standards of measurement, in the heavyweight class. And Gene Hackman as the ours-not-to-reason-why commander and Denzel Washington as the "complicated" deep-thinking Harvard-educated executive officer give equally strong and able representation to noisily clashing points of view. But the movie does not really encourage contemplation. (In word, it may be on Washington's side; in deed, it's on Hackman's.) The ebb and flow of the debate, once it escalates to the ebb and flow of mutiny and counter-mutiny and counter-counter-mutiny, become ever more hysterical and silly. And the constantly prinking and preening photography is too self-conscious of its effect and its effects: too pretty and prettified. Viggo Mortensen, George Dzundza. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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