U-571

Herald rating: **

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, Jon Bon Jovi

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Rating: M (contains medium-level violence)

Running time: 114 minutes Opens: Now showing, Village and Hoyts theatres

Review: Greg Dixon

It's been nearly 20 years since Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot went dive, dive, dive into the canon of classic war films.

It was something rather rare in the genre. A German production for starters, it was a beautifully realised depiction of war. How it dripped with lip-biting tension, breathless claustrophobia and anti-war sentiment. How it told you so much more than you ever wanted to know about fighting a war in a tin can beneath the sea's surface. A right cracker from start to finish.

Evidently Jonathan Mostow was watching - just not very closely.

In his tribute to the Yank submariners who served in the Second World War, the American writer and director (Breakdown) is plainly seeking to deliver an American Das Boot, but instead rather hopelessly paraphrases Petersen's superior work.

This is gung-ho film-making about gung-ho subject matter at its GI Joe worst, employing minimal subplotting and entirely no subtext to tell it like it in fact wasn't.

It is a fictionalised account of a rather important turning point during the war, describing an attempt to snaffle a Nazi "Enigma" machine, a code generator which proved extremely difficult for the Allies to obtain and successfully break.

The year is 1942 and battle is raging in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. Allied - particularly American - freighters are being sunk in vast numbers by German submarines which are able to communicate and target the good guys' shipping in secret, thanks to Enigma.

In an opening sequence that sets the tone for the film, the title's German u-boat enjoys and suffers, in rapid succession, the success and disaster of submarine warfare.

After sinking a freighter, U-571 is in turn crippled by an Allied warship and the Germans are forced to dispatch a please-help message home.

Despite no Enigma, the Americans work out what's going on and dispatch a submarine of their own to intercept U-571 and snatch its Enigma machine and code settings before a German support submarine can come to the u-boat's aid.

America's S33, a First World War-era sub, has the mission and heads out to sea with tensions aboard. The captain, Lt Commander Dahlgren (Paxton in a brief straightforward performance as The Man In-Charge), has prevented Lt Andrew Tyler (McConaughey doing "cold fish") from getting his own command, but they agree - well, they're gentlemen - to put such matters aside for the good of the mission. Though not before Dahlgren has given Tyler the "it really is rather tough at the top" speech, complete with the observation that Tyler isn't man enough to send people out to die.

Of course S33 finds U-571, then there's success, then failure, then success, then failure, then ... well, inevitably it all leads to a death-or-glory proposition that is so entirely implausible it must be Hollywood.

Unfortunately, for all concerned, the tension fades early. Yes, there's the bit - as there always is in submarine movies - where they go beyond the recommended depth (cue lots of sweaty staring at the depth gauge), the bit with depth charges going off all around them and the bit where they rocket back to the surface.

But U-571 simply becomes a series, in quick succession, of problem solving tests for Tyler (and the multiple climaxes now so favoured by Hollywood) that anything resembling character and story development is entirely impossible.

U-571 might well be a boat which spends plenty of time plumbing the depths. The trouble is the U-571 is all surface.