Sub plot dives

Bad Zeitgeist timing - putting out a blockbuster with American stars playing Cold War Russians, with a reminder how near to nuclear war we were in 1961, and still are in 2002. No wonder Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker nose-dived to the bottom of the US box office. It's not such a bad film, actually: visually very impressive and archaeologically stupefying. The K-19 nuclear sub, designed to give Nato a fright by loosing a test missile in the Arctic ice cap, leaked like a rain forest, bust its steel cladding under pressure and looked inside like a B&Q store full of faulty goods the home improvers had returned.

Add to that a drunkard in charge of the reactor core, a medical locum who dosed radiation victims with aspirin and a commander (Harrison Ford) who behaved like a collateral relative of Captain Queeg (of Caine Mutiny infamy), and you have a recipe for apocalyptic disaster. But not necessarily for a successful film.

Martinet Ford (who believes in pushing his men to extremes and beyond) and the liberal-minded, nannying captain (Liam Neeson) he replaces are saddled with hammy Russian-accented English dialogue that sounds more Cod War than Cold War. The sub gives the best performance: the moment it is sent hurtling up from the ocean bed to split the ice cap like a garment rent at the seams has true epic dimensions. And there's an awesome fascination in seeing handcranked military technology before the days of computers and in imagining the agonies of the engineers sent into the reactor chamber to patch and mend, only to emerge like lobsters boiled in their shells.

It's "inspired" by a true story; but such "inspiration" just seems like an old Hollywood yarn, and the dummies who represent the Kremlin appear to be on post-war loan from Madame Tussaud's wax museum. I doubt, too, if the Russian crew showed their contempt for the shadowing American destroyer by lining up on deck for a mass mooning at the US spotter plane. Keeping their end up, they probably did: but not this way.

K-19: The Widowmaker
Cert: cert12A