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A few good men

By Michael Horowitz

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Crimson Tide is a taut, white-knuckle sub thriller that will make you chew your fingers off. And then, with out any digits, you will be unable to point out problems in this film.

The marketing campaign for this flick hasn't been overly concerned with distancing it from The Hunt for Red October, the red sub posters, the similar footage, the cold war themes. And given the present poor state of the action genre, excepting Bad Boys, a two-guys-yelling-at-a-bunch-of-soldiers-with-guns film wouldn't seem on the surface an easy sell. This isn't the same America that went apeshit over Bruckheimer and Simpson's Top Gun back in the Reagan era.

Yet this picture is one of the best underseas actioners yet, a compliment to the big-budget adventures of years past, and a master of the genre conventions. The fact that two of the best living actors, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, are the pivotal stars is gravy.

The latter is the captain of the sub, ordered to send his ship on a mission during a world crisis where a rebel Russian leader has acquired control of nuclear missiles. The fate of the free world, mom, apple pie and all that schtick are dependent on their sub's ability to follow its orders from U.S. high command.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be too much of a problem. Hackman's character lives for orders, and Washington's has been trained all his life to accept them. So the first order comes in.

They're told to launch their missiles at Russia. No big deal. They begin to surface. Then another order starts to come in and it's interrupted before they can read it. Quickly a debate begins over the proper course of action: should they obey the first order or try and acquire the second?

Needless to say, debate and discussion aren't the strong suits of the military, but yelling and waving guns around are. So we get the verbal, physical, and mental battles waged plus the clarion of sub warfare, the torpedo sequence.

This is all filmed very, very well. Tony Scott, master of filming things that move fast (planes in Top Gun, cars in Days of Thunder, roller coasters in True Romance), makes the constantly maneuvering submarine feel like caged hell. Sweat and steam fill the crevices between angry crew members, breathing room is nowhere to be found.

Washington and Hackman are so practiced and perfect at their well-fitting roles that they radiate intensity in their confrontations. While it would have been ultimately more compelling had the film shown less bias to their characters, audience sympathies do not reside completely with either. Crimson Tide could have walked a finer line between good and evil, but the film's path is admirable for its genre.

At the end of the day, it's an action film, and it delivers.

Special bonus to Tarantino fans: due to his polish of Crimson Tide, the filmmaker's signature dialogue permeates the subspeak. Everything you think was written by Tarantino is written by Tarantino, and he is personally responsible for such gems as Hackman's comment on high school girls: "They're instinctive. They're dumb as fenceposts, but they know all the boys want to fuck 'em." Ah, Quentin, your pen is truly more powerful than your acting.

FILM: Crimson Tide. Directed by Tony Scott. Starring Gene Hackman, Denzel Washington. Grade: A-

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