Kevin Macdonald's Black Sea is a predictable but entertaining riff on the always-reliable Treasure of the Sierra Madre formula. Having recently been fired from his lifelong career as a submarine captain, Robinson (Jude Law) hears tell of a German U-boat carrying Nazi gold sunk at the bottom of the Black Sea. Acquiring a rusty old Soviet sub via a shady investor and gathering together a motley crew of Russians and Britons, including known psychopath Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn, whose physical resemblance to 1980s-era Keith Richards is no less distracting for surely being unintentional), company man Daniels (Scoot McNairy), and the exceedingly young Tobin (Bobby Schofield), Robinson sets out to plunder the gold while evading the Russian fleet on the surface. Black Sea is necessarily a grizzled sausage-fest, with the only female character of note being Robinson's ex-wife, who appears mostly in flashback. Truth be told, it might have been a tighter story without that particular subplot, which is nearly as superfluous to the action at hand as Sandra Bullock's backstory was in Gravity. But Black Sea is an expertly crafted genre exercise, one that continues Jude Law's reinvention as Rugged Testosterone Guy that started with Dom Hemingway. And for you science nerds who care about such things, yes, Black Sea does acknowledge that its title sea is anoxic. (Nerd.)
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