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Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)

I think I need to start watching shit, rubbish, the filth of the film industry because I'm finding it difficult to consistently heap praise on every movie I see but, seeing as there has been very little on at the cinema that actually takes my fancy (I have seen a grand total of 0 new films this year and it's already the end of February. Poor show) I guess I may as well catch up on the films I love.

Crimson Tide is one of those films and was made back in the day when the Tony Scott's name actually held some credibility and Jerry Bruckheimer (and the late Don Simpson for that matter) was, at that point, the biggest producer in the world EVER. It's tight, taught and compact, a modern day Mutiny on the Bounty made all the more tense by being set in the cramped confines of a submarine. The leads are excellent and whilst, towards the end, Hackman's Captain Ramsey borders on the hockey, he manages to reign it in enough not to got too over the top. Washington, as always, is great.

Tony Scott may have gone down the route of spastic filmmaking (in that you can't see what the fuck's happening on screen for the majority of his later efforts, I'm looking at you Domino) but this and True Romance very much show that he was, once upon a time, a rather good director.

It's only after you've successfully fallen off your sofa from sitting on the edge of it for two hours that you realise, even after there's been submarine battles, men drowning from being locked in flooding compartments, guns being pointed at anything that breathes and men shouting at each other until they're blue in the face, that you notice that not a single gunshot is fired for the entire runtime, a novelty for a mid-90's action movie.

"Tension you can chew on" wrote Empire upon its initial release. They weren't wrong.

4.5/5

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