This cramped, humid submariner, which drips with disorder, turmoil and the threat of mutiny against the backdrop of the Pacific theater, has just enough moments of officer tension and bunkside shouting matches to qualify for 90's Jerry Bruckheimer.
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Truth be told, it's not entirely meant as a pejorative - after all, I quite like The Rock and Crimson Tide, two sterling examples of the Bruckheimer machine that got rolling in the mid-90's and seem to take quite a bit of cues from Run Silent, Run Deep.
-Haunted by a Japanese destroyer, commander P.J. Richardson (an appropriately leathered and tanned Clark Gable) supplants officer Jim Bledsoe (the always wonderful Burt Lancaster) and secretly plans to take the USS Nerka back to the Bungo Straits in the Japanese waters and take down the ship that sank him one year prior.
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Yes, it's quite evident that Edward L. Beach (an ex-naval officer who wrote the 1955 novel upon which the film is based on) has read Herman Melville, but his Captain Ahab isn't quite the towering, mythical figure that he should be, and the film never really takes off in that direction.
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No, for the most part, this is a straight-up men-at-war action film with a more compromised character at its center. Gable reportedly feared being upstaged by the younger, bulkier Lancaster (who doubles as producer), but he needn't fear. [B-]
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