The plot had all the ingredients of a modern-day Treasure Island and a good cast but just like the fate of the characters, the story line faltered, tried too much on 'making it look genuine' with little research and left the viewer in the dark.

The plot etc is covered well everywhere else so this is limited to my opinion:I liked it a lot. Law's accent is dodgy, technically there are a few issues and several things are implausible (e.g. taking a noob kid on a sub when apparently he knows loads of experienced guys, fiding the swastika on the 200 m long sunken U Boat etc). However, it felt realistic and gripping and the best thing about it was I had no idea where it was going.Nice job, delighted I watched it.

Drama is very unreal but it contains lots of action and action fans will like it. It's very unreal they haven't taken anything against the killer and because of the character who killed a man, the accident happened and killed many others. In real life they would have taken something. They have sunken two times, at the first time the submarine was lightly damaged, the second time at least it was damaged as many would expect. Good point is movie shows greed and the Russian mentality as they are superstitious, they are stemming the crew as they believe the virgin man brings the bad luck. Maybe that could've been proved as true on end of the film as many of the crew stood bellow with the fishes. When they finally find the gold, they want to take all 4.5 tons of it at once and it turned dangerously, some of them want to ditch the gold and they want to emerge empty handed. I was what?! No one ditch out the gold so easily but they had a reason so they mitigate that unrealistic part. Most characters are greedy but not the captain so that's the good point when you take greedy persons and put them in the not so big space dozens of meters bellow the water. It has a message but things could've been done much better, better to say more realistic but it's more than a good movie though.

There have been many submarine films in the past, but the genre seemed to have died out, until this one appeared. The two most famous submarine films ever made were DAS BOOT (1981, 293 minutes long in the original uncut version) and ON THE BEACH (1959, see my review). In the latter film, the submarine was incidental to the story but much of the time was spent in it. Of the many wartime submarine dramas of earlier years, I remember UP PERISCOPE (1959, with James Garner), SUBMARINE COMMAND (1951, with William Holden), and others the titles of which I have forgotten. Others include MYSTERY SUBMARINE (1963), SUBMARINE D-1 (1937), John Ford's SUBMARINE PATROL (1938), S.O.S. SUBMARINE (1941), SUBMARINE SEAHAWK (1958), SUBMARINE ALERT (1943), SUBMARINE BASE (1943), SUBMARINE WARFARE (1946), PIRATE SUBMARINE (1951), and so on. (I refrain from listing the many earlier films about World War I submarines, some of which were silent films.) Somebody ought to hold a submarine retrospective film festival one day. Claustrophobes, be warned! All the films could be watched through periscopes. Probably the last high-profile submarine film until now was THE HUNT FOR RED October (1990, with Sean Connery), which made a big splash at the time (pun intended). This new one stars Jude Law, who is excellent, and rather scary, in the lead role as a very rough Scottish character. I learn from IMDb's invaluable trivia that he affected an 'Aberdonian' accent, i.e. one from Aberdeen. It sounded like George Galloway to me, and he is from Dundee, but whatever it was it was entirely convincing, so well done, Jude. The film was directed by a Glasgow lad named Kevin Macdonald, well known for his earlier THE LAST KING OF Scotland (2006) and for STATE OF PLAY (2009, see my review). He certainly has directed a high-intensity film with this one. The story involves a group of treasure-hunters acquiring an old Soviet submarine to search for gold in a sunken Nazi U-boat in the Black Sea, and much of the film was shot inside a real one, the old Soviet submarine moored at Strood in Kent. So there is plenty of authenticity about the film. As for the gold, the film story is that Stalin ordered two tonnes of gold to be sent to Hitler during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but the submarine carrying it sank in the Black Sea. The gang of desperadoes gathered together by Jude Law for his madcap expedition includes jailbirds, a homicidal psychopath, a boy of 18 with a subnormal IQ, and a shifty representative of a crooked business concern. Half the crew have to be Russians because the sub is Russian and only they can operate it. Jude Law is the commander, with a handy translator standing beside him. The Russians are all colourfully rough, grumbling characters cursing everyone and everything in Russian like disorderly Cossacks looting a town and arguing over who gets to rape which girl. So there is endless tension, conflict, and enough confined atmosphere to drive any claustrophobe crazy with anxiety. The good news is that they find the gold. But there is some bad news. Watch and sweat.