Explosions rattle the crew. The air is turning fetid. And the captain has ordered a descent toward “crush depth.” Yet everything is on course in Phantom, the newest model of the old submarine-from-hell picture.
But the predictability of writer-director Todd Robinson’s film is, well, predictable. There are only so many things that can happen in the close quarters of an imperiled sub. What Robinson purports to do is show those familiar undersea events from a different vantage point. All the characters in Phantom serve in the Soviet navy of the 1960s.
The USSR angle, alas, is where the movie really disappoints. An opening title claims that the story was “inspired by actual events,” but it actually riffs on a lone factoid: the 1968 disappearance of K-129, whose fate was the partial inspiration for such fictions as 1990’s The Hunt for Red October.
How and why that craft sank remains classified, so Robinson’s script is entirely speculation. His version of what might have occurred is as banal as the movie’s hammy performances and clunky expository dialogue. Phantom offers no more plausible a vision of the doomed K-129 than A Good Day to Die Hard does of post-meltdown Chernobyl.
In this geopolitical fantasy, the aging sub is piloted by Demi (Ed Harris), a captain with good connections but a bad blotch on his record. He and much of his crew, including loyal first officer Alex (William Fichtner), just finished another mission on a more modern sub.