Greyhound: Captain Tom Hanks writes and delivers a tight, tense, theatre-experience war film
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Maybe Tom Hanks should write more of his own movies.
America’s Everyman’s movie battle bona fides include Saving Private Ryan and his producing role in Band of Brothers. And he’s back at war in Greyhound, acting out his lean and tense adaptation of C. S. Forester’s 1955 Battle of the Atlantic novel The Good Shepherd.
Like Hanks himself – who, with his wife Rita Wilson, recently overcame COVID-19 – the movie has had to adjust to current realities as well. Once bound for the big screen where it belongs, it is instead debuting on Apple TV+. Here’s hoping you have a 4K in your living room.
Captain Krause (Tom Hanks) surveys the ocean amid a U-Boat cat-and-mouse game in Greyhound
What’s interesting about the lifelong war-buff’s approach to this movie is that Hanks has been absolutely ruthless with Forester’s novel, paring it down to 91 minutes of pure tension sandwiched by bursts of action. No nice-guy as an editor, his approach was probably not appreciated by some cast-members, notably Elisabeth Shue, whose character has all of one scene and one phone-call with her husband, Capt. Ernest Krause (Hanks).
Hence the complaints of some that the characters are all-but-unexplored.
But here’s the thing about character development in war movies. For every From Here to Eternity, there are scores of disasters like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, where romances and soap opera push the battle back like an afterthought. There is little room for pleasantries in the heat of battle, and Greyhound turns hot very fast.
So, here’s Hanks as a career Navy officer with no battle experience, a few months after Pearl Harbor, commanding the USS Keeling (codename: Greyhound), with the job of guarding a flotilla of 37 ships – most of them supply carriers - in waters too far from either side of the Atlantic to receive air support. We are barely into the movie before the first U-Boat attack comes, and soon there is an entire pack of these undersea wolves intent on destroying both Greyhound and the convoy. (A source of left-over pride a week after Canada Day, one of Greyhound’s key support ships in their random battles is a Canadian Corvette called The Dicky).
Director Aaron Schneider does a workmanlike job parlaying moments of sonar detections and hair-trigger patience (“wait for it.. wait for it…”), with a young twentysomething cast full of energy, whose job is to stand perfectly still as they unflappably do their jobs. The rest is CGI and stylized North Atlantic footage shot by a second unit with the help of the Canadian Armed Forces.
(One of the quibbles I do have with the movie is that the North Atlantic in late winter/early spring should be turning sailors’ fingers blue, with copious frost on the breath).
There are a few characters who actually could have done with a few more getting-to-know-you moments – including Stephen Graham, and Stranger Things’ Rob Morgan as the ship’s cook and the only black crewmember in this still segregated Navy. (He mostly worries whether the Captain is eating enough).
And, in a touch that evokes 1957’s The Enemy Below, with Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens, Krause is repeatedly taunted over the radio by a U-Boat commander who somehow knows a lot about their mission. Not much is made of this, the Germans being an otherwise faceless and unseen enemy here.
Still, Greyhound remains a breathlessly tense and compact naval war film, and a reminder of what Hanks brings to any role.
Greyhound. Directed by Aaron Schneider. Written by Tom Hanks from the novel by C.S. Forester. Starring Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham and Rob Morgan. Begins streaming Friday, July 10 on Apple TV+.