Clearly a vanity project independent film, total Marty Stu main character...the actor is also the producer and many of the voice-overs.
There are maybe 2 reasons to watch this film. 1) you're an anime nerd who loves English dubs and wanna see Brittney Karbowski & Shelley Calene-Black in a live action film and 2) you've had enough Navy JROTC/NROTC classes and a basic understanding of Oceanography to appreciate how completely ridiculous this movie is...I give it 4 stars because while it is a TERRIBLE movie, I was HOWLING with laughter at several points, but only because I was giving it the full MST3K treatment it richly deserves, and because reasons 1 & 2 apply to me personally.
They could only afford actual Russian dialogue for the opening scene...the rest of the scenes with Russian characters have them speaking English with Russian accents of varying quality. Oh and the WRITING! The writing is so god-awful I could not stop laughing. Like one of the hostage scenes....is written so poorly I can't believe the actors didn't stop the director and say "wait a minute, these lines are fugging stupid....can we get a re-write here?"
Definitely one of those rare instances of so-bad-it's good. And also because if you do actually understand at least a little bit about Naval Operations and International Relations the ludicrous ineptitude of the writing is really really funny. It's one step above "and the man pressed the button that makes the submarine dive and the submarine dove" levels of dumb. This screenplay wouldn't even merit an honorable mention in a short story competition....it would come back with "D-" on it and a note from the teacher "see me after class"....
Still, I can't say I wasn't entertained & I laughed way harder than I expected to. Four stars, but can only recommend to other people who meet the narrow niche interests above.
