It’s good to be Jude Law in 2014. Well, it’s probably good to be Jude Law any time, but this year is shaping up to be quite the winning stretch for the London thesp. He had a small but meaty role in Wes Anderson’s shimmering jewel box of a movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and now his name’s being whispered as a possible villain in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming refashioning of the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. But coming next for Law is “Black Sea,” a tense-looking thriller largely set in the cramped confines of a submarine. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the deft Scottish filmmaker who helmed “State of Play” and “The Last King of Scotland,” “Black Sea” tells the tale of a U-boat crew that goes hunting for Nazi gold, and the first clip for the movie has arrived.
Law takes the role of a submarine captain who is laid off by his previous employers, but then is recruited by some less-than-reputable fellows and is tipped off that a Nazi submarine in his vicinity may have a sizeable stash of gold on board. He bands together a group of even less reputable sea rats —encompassing a who’s who of character actors including “Killing them Softly” buddies Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy, and Karl Davies of “Game of Thrones”— to go a-gold-huntin’ in the murky depths of the film’s namesake sea. Things get prickly between the crew, with each individual becoming increasingly paranoid about his share and the measures that others may take to protect their own.
It sounds like a ripe set-up for a genre exercise, and if done well, “Black Sea” could be a fun, pretense-free January time-passer: a variation on the dudes-on-a-mission military thriller crystallized in “The Dirty Dozen” and attempted recently in David Ayer’s gruesome “Fury.” Macdonald has a solid track record and a versatile lead in Law, so we’ll keep an eye out on this one.
Watch the first clip. Focus Features will release “Black Sea” in the U.S. on January 23rd, 2015.