Release Date:
04/19/2001
The last time we had this much fun underwater, we were in a hot tub. U-571, the new wham-bam submarine action movie starring Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, and Harvey Keitel, doesn’t bore us with wussy moralizing or tear-filled speeches. It’s World War II the way we like it: The Nazis are cardboard villains, the good guys kick Das Booty, and Jon Bon Jovi eats the big torpedo.
As the movie opens, said Nazis threaten to control the sea lanes of the Atlantic with their killer U-boats and super-secret Enigma code machine. It’s up to a crack squad of American sailors to capture a German sub, steal the Enigma, and do it without those damned Germans finding out. Once this premise is established, the movie is nonstop torpedoes, harrowing last-minute escapes, and hissing leaks in the hull. Terrifying depth-charge sequences do for U-571 what the thud-thud-thud of unseen T-Rex’s did for Jurassic Park.
Reminiscent of old-style war movies like The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen, U-571 features uniformly tight-lipped tough-guy performances. McConaughey abandons his usual plastic, pretty-boy image and plays a green captain who quickly learns that controlling his soldiers during combat means controlling himself first. Although historically dubious (the film implies that it was the U.S. military forces that first acquired the Enigma, but it was really the Brits), U-571 is a solidly entertaining action flick that’s a welcome corrective to Private Ryan— it puts the fun back into the WWII genre.
As the movie opens, said Nazis threaten to control the sea lanes of the Atlantic with their killer U-boats and super-secret Enigma code machine. It’s up to a crack squad of American sailors to capture a German sub, steal the Enigma, and do it without those damned Germans finding out. Once this premise is established, the movie is nonstop torpedoes, harrowing last-minute escapes, and hissing leaks in the hull. Terrifying depth-charge sequences do for U-571 what the thud-thud-thud of unseen T-Rex’s did for Jurassic Park.
Reminiscent of old-style war movies like The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen, U-571 features uniformly tight-lipped tough-guy performances. McConaughey abandons his usual plastic, pretty-boy image and plays a green captain who quickly learns that controlling his soldiers during combat means controlling himself first. Although historically dubious (the film implies that it was the U.S. military forces that first acquired the Enigma, but it was really the Brits), U-571 is a solidly entertaining action flick that’s a welcome corrective to Private Ryan— it puts the fun back into the WWII genre.