COVID-`19 survivor Tom Hanks shifts from container vessel captain in Captain Phillips to Navy Commander Ernest Krause during the Battle of the Atlantic in a new film he scripted under the direction of Aaron Schneider (Get Low). Here, after the red cardigan sweater as a beloved television host in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Krause needs some comfy slippers to a little while to get off of his bloodied feet.
Greyhound also features Elisabeth Shue, Stephen Graham and Rob Morgan in what boasts taut excitement on the high seas in early 1942 with emphasis on jingoistic action. It’s accompanied by nebulous Navy lingo shouldn’t dismay those into this kind of fare that was originally slated to appear on the silver screen for Father’s Day prior to a global pandemic during a turbulent presidential election year.
The neophyte scenarist draws from a 1955 C. S. Forester book that allows his prayerful character frontline exposure where a portrait of uncertainty and earnest reverence emerges. Thomas Kretchmann of The Pianist voices a taunting German foe with its wolfpack of U-Boats putting the destroyer U.S.S. Keeling having the eponymous codename in harm’s way.
An old-fashioned technicolor gloss makes what is undernourished in narrative and character richer visually especially when it peers out on occasion outside its tight quarters. Thus, given the focus of writer and director nothing like Das Boot or The Perfect Storm is approachable.
Shue (remember Piranha, Leaving Las Vegas and Cocktail) fleetingly appears as Krause’s love interest Eva and Graham (The Irishman) is a loyal second-in-command Charlie Cole noticing what ails his superior. Maybe Morgan registers the most as a galley steward a beleaguered Krause mistake for a colleague. But, the tension and point-of-view is considered mostly, if not thoroughly, through its central figure whose subtext from its antecedent is left undeveloped.
Still, for a burial at sea, averting torpedoes, and plenty of chaos for midshipmen to maneuver through, Greyhound is an admirable sleek in the tradition of Golden Age Hollywood where Hanks dutiful and torn Comdr. Krause could exist.