Phantom | Movie review

Manly, sharp-edged submarine B movies don’t come along often anymore, so consider this Cold War off-white-knuckler a welcome blast of recycled air. It helps that writer-director Todd Robinson takes on a real historical question (why, exactly, the Soviet nuke-sub K-129 sunk in 1968, as speculated upon in the 2006 book Red Star Rogue) and has a passion for the cast-iron realities of work on a Russian vessel. Once a KGB contingent seizes control of the boat and prepares to start WWIII, it’s mano a mano in a tin can, with Ed Harris and William Fichtner as old-school vets and David Duchovny as the steely megalomaniac spy. As far as such potboilers go, Phantom is literate, tense and, thankfully, modest.