SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A highly streamlined war film, Greyhound benefits from the efforts of Tom Hanks whose screenplay and acting serve to distract from barely present character development and a lack of concrete storytelling.
A safe pick. That’s the best way to quickly describe Aaron Schneider’s Greyhound. It’s got Tom Hanks. It’s a gripping war story, basic and barebones at a time when many blockbusters try to upstage each other by growing ever more convoluted. It is direct, and in a way, I like it for taking that approach. But even as I found myself impressed by its spirit, in which echoes of Dunkirk and 1917 can be seen, I couldn’t help but think that maybe just a little too much had been left by the wayside. The qualities it lacks are made most evident in the way its battle sequences grip you, and the way its characters sometimes fail to do so.
The year is 1942. Several months after the United States entered the Second World War, convoys of cargo ships are crossing the treacherous North Atlantic to supply a beleaguered Britain. At the head of this particular convoy is the destroyer USS Keeling, codename “Greyhound” under the command of Captain Krause (Tom Hanks), who is making the first Atlantic crossing of his career. Charged with protecting the cargo ships from the predations of a roving wolf pack of German U-boat submarines, Krause finds himself struggling to protect the ships as they sail into the “Black Pit”, a particularly dangerous stretch of the route that lies outside the range of Allied airpower.
Like his crew on the Greyhound, we in the audience have learned to trust Tom Hanks when he’s at the helm. And in this film, we are rewarded for that trust. As Commander Krause, Hanks is utterly indefatigable and stoic to the end. As his crew hasten to obey a near-endless stream of manoeuvres and nautical jargon, we too are caught in his grip. In the process of powering forward, the film drops almost all pretence of character development. Krause’s relationship with his girlfriend, played by an almost invisible Elisabeth Shue, scarcely crosses our minds. Nor does a tentative friendship with Cleveland, one of his ship’s messmates. As the ships cross the perilous North Atlantic, we are treated to nail-bitingly tense action sequences as the convoy tussles with the German submarine wolf pack. Hanks spills a constant stream of orders to his crew, and they obey. Courtesy of the cinematographers, the Greyhound’s guns boom and roar, and below decks, the crew plot the positions of enemy submarines and calculate courses and speeds, scratching down in graphite pencil the complex mathematics of warfare, and indeed the mathematics of life and death. All the while, we are left hanging on every word of the man monitoring the sonar and hydrophones as he listens out for the telltale sounds of underwater propellers.
Though Dunkirk it isn’t, these gripping sequences make up most of Greyhound’s runtime. It’s a considerably streamlined sort of film; oddly unconcerned with issues of giving its characters anything more than a subtly implied depth, it’s almost documentary-like in its focus on the journey of the convoy. Interspersed between these scenes are moments of eerie calm, when the wolf pack are still tailing the convoy just out of weapons range. We think that maybe now Krause might be able to catch a wink of sleep or a bite to eat. He stares out of a bridge porthole. Is he pondering his own mortality, or just preoccupied with sore feet from standing up the whole night? Perhaps both. But before the poor man can get more than a sip of coffee, a U-boat appears from the deep like a shark circling wounded prey, timed almost comically as if to interrupt Krause’s breakfast. General quarters are sounded, and as the submarine slips beneath the waves once again to begin its hunt, Krause and crew are back at work. That familiar sense of tension and dread quickly returns. Greyhound is unrelentingly intense, and efficient and economical in delivering that tension. Ninety minutes seems like the perfect length of time to keep the audience in a vice-grip that only occasionally slackens.
The overall impression is that it’s filmed and edited in a satisfyingly workmanlike fashion, setting aside the occasional awkward dump of ship names and timestamps. Perhaps more could have been done to make our characters feel a little more human however. It seems a little odd that this film seems more interested in re-enacting a naval battle than conducting a character study of the man in charge of it all by testing the talents of its lead star. In fact, its depiction of him as a clean-shaven, uncomplicated American hero is so plain it’s almost refreshing. But of course, as the writer of the screenplay and its main star, Hanks carries this war film through and keeps it going, even despite the lack of a more concrete storytelling base. And without the jarring hyper-patriotism that dogs so many war films, Greyhound actually makes for a solid enough watch by itself, even if you’ll quickly return to Hanks’ other, more noteworthy performances.
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