Film Review: Phantom

At the risk of being overly simple, the submarine thriller Phantom is not in any way a good movie. To the contrary, it’s quite bad. Admittedly, it doesn’t do enough to merit adjectives like “terrible,” “atrocious” or “mind-numbing,” but that shouldn’t detract from the aforementioned point about it being bad. For a film packed with some truly quality actors (Ed Harris and David Duchovny among them) and pretty solid claustrophobic camerawork, almost nothing about the picture as a whole ever clicks.

The plot is inoffensive enough. Undistinguished Soviet Sub Captain Demi (Harris) is sent out on one. last. mission, along with his up-and-coming second-in-command Alex (William Fichtner). Unfortunately, they’re joined by KGB agent Bruni (Duchovny) who has an…ulterior motive. Demi spends much of the film trying to figure out what Bruni is up to, and suffice it to say, it isn’t good.

The movie is “based on true events,” but much of the film runs askew of reality, often deliberately. For one, all of the characters have American accents. This is less noticeable than, say, Sean Connery’s Scottish brogue in Hunt for Red October, but this movie relies far too much on Soviet culture for the tactic to work. Although writer/director Todd Robinson claims he used the accents to emphasize the universality of the horrors, the finished product merely comes off as confused in its politics.

The biggest problem the film has is not the accents, which could be forgiven. No— its problem is that, for a film reliant much more on conversations than on shootouts and underwater action (it very well could be staged as a minimalist play), it has woefully poor dialogue. It’s the type of film where a daughter will look at her father’s body and say “I wish he knew how proud I was,” as her father’s ghostly spectre nods his head solemnly in response #tootritetohandle. Obviously, the death of a parent is worthy of a strong emotional response, but there’s a fine line between being brutally honest and totally manipulative.

Ed Harris, as the lead, is also unfortunately saddled with more daddy issues than Luke Skywalker. He spends the whole film trying to live up to the legacy of his father, who we learn through flashbacks is a big deal Soviet submarine captain who…was away from home a lot? That’s it? Call me insensitive, but it was difficult to care about a 68-year-old protagonist’s troubled relationship with his long-dead father when there are, avoiding explicit spoilers, potentially apocalyptic stakes involved.

Honestly, I was most disappointed with the fact that Phantom isn’t even bad enough to be memorable. The dialogue is always awful enough to get you out of the film’s reality, but not awful enough for campy entertainment. It’s a film destined to be lost to history, too mediocre and uninteresting to inspire even the slightest curiosity.