Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.20

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Blood Diamond (2006) — 9/10
2. Cape Fear (1991) — 9/10
3. Das Netz (1991) — 9/10
4. Donnie Brasco (1997) — 8/10
5. Sandman S02 (2025) — 4/10
6. Road to Perdition (2002) — 7/10
7. Jump Cut (2024) — 8/10
8. Die drei Musketiere (1948) — 7/10
9. The Grudge (2019) — 6/10
10. U-571 (2000) — 6/10

Blood Diamond (2006) — 9/10

Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a diamond smuggler in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He’s incredible, seemingly using a different accent for each person he talks to. to put them at ease. After having gotten a bunch of diamonds off of Commander Zero (Percy Matsemela), he attempts to cross the border into Liberia, where he is caught by border patrol and arrested for smuggling jewels. The diamonds had been sewn into the skin of the goats with which he’d been traveling.

In jail, he meets Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who has escaped from a diamond-digging labor camp run by the criminals in the RFU, to which he’s been consigned ever since the rebels had destroyed his village and sent his family fleeing into the jungle. He had found a large pink diamond and hidden it in the jungle but one of the other captured rebels—Captain Poison (David Harewood)—had seen it. He reveals this to the whole jail, putting Solomon in danger—and getting Danny’s attention, who believes it immediately.

Danny’s partner springs him from jail, and he springs Solomon as well, keeping a tail on him. Journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) squeezes Danny for information about the diamond-smuggling trade at a local bar, but Danny is onto her quickly, telling her “I like to get kissed before I get fucked,” and then leaving.

The funny thing is that everyone in this movie believes that the diamond is real. Like, immediately. Danny believes it. Vandy knows it. He saw it. But does he start to doubt what found? Like, maybe it wasn’t so great? Danny starts estimating the number of carats in it, almost as if he’s already got it in his hand. But it’s not just him! His boss, Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo), absolutely doesn’t question whether it exists before pouring a tremendous amount of resources into finding it.

Danny teams up with Vandy, at first for purely selfish reasons—he wants the diamond for himself—but then for slightly less-selfish reasons—his boss has pretty directly threatened that there will be hell to pay if he doesn’t deliver that big, pink diamond. He’s back in Sierra Leone, just in time for the RUF to conquer Freetown and take Vandy’s son Dia, whom Captain Poison immediately starts to convert into a child soldier, using a brutal combination of brainwashing, torture, murder rituals, and heroin.

Archer and Vandy barely escape with their lives in a spectacular scene. In Lungi, they meet back up with Maddy, from whom Danny must admit he needs help. Quid pro quo. Give up your smuggling ring. He obliges. He also very obviously uses stories of his shattered youth in Rhodesia to elicit the kind of compassion that gets you very, very laid.

“Maddy: You lost both your parents.
Danny: That’s a polite way of putting it, ja. Mum was raped and shot and uh… Dad was decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn. I was nine… boo-hoo right?”

It works. Bing, bang, boom.

Maddy uses her connections to help Vandy find his family, where he discovers that Dia has been taken. His new mission is to find his son. He will only show Danny where the diamond is once he gets his son back.

In Kono, they’ve gotten in range of not only the diamond but also Coetzee’s mercenary army, which is fighting for Sierra Leone for now. Coetzee’s mercenaries are tasked with taking out Captain Poison’s army, which now includes Dia. Vandy locates Dia and tries to drag him out, but he’s too brainwashed, calling his father “fisherman” disdainfully. Archer radios in the coordinates to Coetzee and the assault begins. In the chaos, Vandy confronts Poison and beats him to death with a shovel.

They’re finally at the spot, finally where the pink diamond is buried. Vandy is under the watchful eye of Coetzee and his men. He pretends not to know exactly where it is. He digs several holes. Archer takes them all out except Dia, Vandy digs up the stone, Archer and Vandy are briefly triumphant, … until Dia commands them to drop the stone. He says it’s not their stone. It belongs to RUF.

Vandy has to talk his son down from shooting them both.

They’re on the run, through the bush. The remaining mercenaries are in hot pursuit; they know what Danny has. They’re not seeking revenge for Coetzee—he was an asshole to everyone. They’re after the diamond.

Archer’s not going to make it. He’s been fatally wounded. Vandy carries him some of the way up the mountain but Archer makes him put him down. He demands that they continue on without him, that Vandy get himself, Dia, and the diamond out of the country.

“Vandy: I thought you would steal it [the diamond] from me.
Danny: [Grins weakly] Yeah, yeah, it occurred to me, huh?”

He tells his pilot to pick them up. He tells Vandy not to trust the pilot, not to drop his weapon, or he’ll take the diamond. But it’s the only chance he’s got.

Vandy and Dia are on their way.

Archer leans against a boulder, taking in the view of the veldt.

He calls Maddy. They say goodbye. He tells her to pick up Vandy and Dia in Guinea, that there’s a big story there. As they’d half-jokingly discussed before, she can write whatever she likes once he’s dead. He dies looking out over they continent that would never have let him go, his blood mixing with the red sand.

Vandy meets with a van de Kaap (really: De Beers) top representative, whom Maddy captures on camera. Vandy takes the money, but does not turn over the diamond until he’s gotten his family back as well. They oblige—the diamond’s that big and important.

va de Kaap stores the diamond in their vault, to keep it off of the market, artificially inflating the value of the diamonds that they actually can sell. All of that bloodshed, for what? To put a rock into a metal box in a vault with thousands of other metal boxes with rocks in them, all owned by a company that sells overpriced rocks to rich people.

Maddy publishes her exposé, with the one, good picture of Danny she’d managed to take, and laying out van de Kaap’s smuggling lines through several countries. Vandy is back in South Africa, giving a talk about his experience.

Cape Fear (1991) — 9/10

Credits up front. Starts with a voiceover. Now that’s a confident, old-school film.

Danielle Bowden (Juliette Lewis) narraties for a minute, then we segue to an incredibly buff Max Cady (Robert De Niro) doing chin-ups in his prison cell. The camera pans across his Stalin and Hitler memorabilia, then across his lightning-bolt tattoos. This is a bad hombre, probably a white-supremacist, maybe a Nazi.

He strides out of prison, “you don’t want your books?” “I already read ‘em.”

He walks straight into the camera, a storm brewing in the sky behind him, ominous music playing. This is a super-villain, make no mistake.

Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is a lawyer married to designer Leigh (Jessica Lange). They meet Max in a movie theater, where he’s smoking a cigar and laughing uproariously and stupidly. He seems to barely notice them as they leave early.

Except … that he paid their bill for ice cream afterward. Only Sam knows this, and only Sam saw him.

The next day Max confronts Sam, calling him fat (he’s not) and reminding him that he’d put him away in ‘77. “You gonna learn ‘bout loss.”

Max lurks near their home.

Sam talks to his boss Tom Broadbent (Fred Thompson), to whom he admits that he’d buried a report that had determined that Cady’s victim was “promiscuous”. This is a no-no as Sam was Max’s counsel. He just didn’t like Max, he’d seen what he’d done to the victim, and he was afraid that it would be enough to either spring him, or at least drastically reduce his sentence. He’s not wrong. A woman’s promiscuity should have no bearing on whether or not she’s beaten—like, if she’s whorish enough times, does she deserve a good beating or two? Is that how we run things? Oh, right. I hear it. Of course that’s how it works..

Max rolls up to Sam in a Cadillac. They discuss compensation. Sam starts off at $10,000 to go away. That amount of money was adorable, even then. Max says that even $50,000 was barely $10 a day for all the time he’d lost Max is framing this discussion, knowing that Sam feels guilty for having done something wrong. Remember, Max was not railroaded; he really had beaten a woman nearly to death.

Leigh calls Sam at the office. Their dog’s been poisoned.

At the police station. Sam has Lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum) haul Max in. He’s happy to do it, ready to charge him with vagrancy, or whatever. “There’s lots o’ charges we can use.” He clearly doesn’t like Max, but for the wrong reasons. He just hates “white trash,” which is exactly the kind of shit that doesn’t help keep a lid on resentful pieces of shit like Max.

Max is chatting up Sam’s work colleague Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas). She’s quite drunk and absolutely primed to be chatted up. They’re in her apartment, on her bed. He’s getting rough but she’s not opposed. He flips her over. She’s still OK with it. He handcuffs her. No complaints. He chomps a huge chunk out of her cheek. She shoots right past concerned, worried, and alarmed, right to terrified.

Egart calls Sam, says there might be a break in the case. Max had been seen leaving Lori’s house; she was later found badly beaten. The cops say that she’s too scared to talk, that she says she fell down some stairs. And was bitten on the face? Really? That’s the story? Anyway, she doesn’t want to press charges because it is 1991 in the U.S. of A. and no-one believes women yet.

Instead, they will cheerfully focus laser-like on the way she’d been dressed, on how much she’d had to drink, how she’d behaved, you know. all of the things she might have done to tempt poor Max into raping her, beating the shit out of her, and biting her cheek off. This was not—and probably still isn’t—a slam-dunk case. She recounts having been on the other side of cross-examinations like that, taking a victim apart and “laughing about it later”.

Elgart has a plan:

“The way I’d handle it: Just think of this fellow Cady as a tiger. The trick is to get him out of the brush. Now, how do we do that? You stake out a couple of your goats and hide in a tree.”

Oh, yeah, he absolutely just called Sam’s wife and teenaged daughter “goats.”

Sam meets up with private detective Claude Kersek (Joe Don Baker). He digs a bit and discovers that Cady had had to serve seven years past his first shot at parole because of a suspicious “incident” in the prison kitchen: an inmate with whom he’d locked horns had “turned up dead with his tongue bit out.”

Leigh finds out about Lori but she’s not surprised because Sam is a well-known philanderer. Dani’s in her room and she hears everything. Dani is a 15-year-old girl who’s watching her parents’ marriage fall apart but she’s also titillated by knowing that Max might be interested in her. She has a pink Swatch phone. This is such a perfect role for Juliette Lewis. She was 18 at the time of the movie’s release, so probably 17 during filming. That’s interesting: in 1991, they still just cast teenagers as teenagers rather than casting 28-year-olds.

Leigh doesn’t know Max. So when he pulls up in his convertible Cadillac, she doesn’t know who he is. It’s only when he gives her dog’s collar back that Leigh cops to who he is. But she doesn’t break off the conversation. Dani comes outside and Max gets his first look at her, then speeds off.

Max pretends to be Dani’s drama teacher. He quickly gets her to take a hit off of a joint, spinning his web, luring her in, letting her do the work for him. This is a long scene, grade-A grooming on his part. It’s incredible how well she acts. She was only 17. It takes her a lot longer than Leigh, but she figures out that he’s not the drama teacher.

The hook is in, though. She keeps talking. He keeps talking. Eventually, “Do you mind if I put my arm around you?” Eventually, “No. I don’t mind.” It segues quickly to her sucking his thumb, completely infatuated, completely entranced. They kiss. He walks away. The spell broken, she seems to awaken, and runs off as well.

Sam has Kersek hire three thugs to work Max over with lead pipes and chains. He takes a lot of hits, then just gets up and takes them all out. Sam makes a noise, alerting Cady. “Counselor? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

Max had of course taped Sam’s threats, issued the day before the attack. Sam had threatened him to get him to go away so that there would be no attack. Now, Cady is pressing charges against him. He has retained the services of Lee Heller (Gregory Peck), the lawyer that Sam had tried to retain. The restraining order is for 500 yards and Heller follows up by saying that he will issue a petition to the ABA to disbar Sam for “moral turpitude”

Kersek helps the family pretend to go to Raleigh for the ethics-committee hearing. Then they boobytrap the house and wait. The book between Esther and Psalms to which Max had one point referred to is Job. You know, the one where God makes Job lose everything to see if he’ll forsake him. Sam has started smoking.

Dani’s a loose cannon, though. She’s definitely the weak link. She finds Henry Miller’s Sexus on the porch—she’d discussed it with Max when he’d lured her into the basement at school. She hides it.

Max makes short work of Graciella (Zully Montero) and Kersek, using piano wire that he’d taken from their piano. That wipes Dani’s self-satisfied smirk off of her face right quick. Her “friend” is, apparently, a bad man. Sam and Leigh slip and fall into Kersek’s copious blood, rolling around in it. Sam is unhinged, grabbing the wire and the gun and running outside to kill Max. He fires wildly.

They flee the scene, fugitives, heading for Cape Fear on their houseboat. They will return when the police have caught Cady. Fat chance; Cady clung to the bottom of their car all the way out there.

They’re eating dinner. It starts raining. Max knocks out Sam and confronts Leigh and Danielle. Danielle tries to sweet-talk him and throws hot water on him. He is unfazed. He shows how he is impervious to heat by lighting a signal flare and letting it drip down over his hand. He throws Danielle into the hold, then starts assaulting Leigh. Sam watches, powerless, from his prone state on the deck of the boat outside.

Leigh almost gets his gun but he’s too well-prepared. Max drags Sam in.and stomps his face a few times. Now, it’s Leigh’s turn to try to seduce him. Max ignores her pleas not to rape Dani and says “I’m going to enjoy this all the more.” He lights up a cigar. Dani shoots lighter fluid on him, setting him on fire. He stumbles out the window and falls into the water.

Is he gone? No. No, he’s not. He climbs the anchor line, looking very much like Brundlefly now, and takes command again, much more pissed off than before. He beats a confession out of Sam, that he’d buried the report. Sam’s regretting it, of course, but also probably thinking that the man deserved much more. Sam hadn’t uphold the law but what he did was just.

“Both of you! Leigh! Danielle! Take off your clothes! Tonight you’re gonna learn how to live like an animal, and then die like one!”

The boat’s sluing around so hard that it’s going to make Max’s plan somewhat more difficult to see to fruition. He’s nothing if not confident and persistent, though.

Danielle and Leigh escape into the wild river. Max catches Sam but Sam manages to handcuff Max’s foot to the boat and then jumps out just as it’s smashing up.

Max lives. Sam starts hitting him with a rock. Max laughs, telling him that he’s “within 500 yards.” They beat each other in the face with rocks. Sam tries to drop a huge rock on Max’s head but the current washes the piece of boat to which Max is still handcuffed out into the river. He babbles, sings, and speaks in tongues as he sinks beneath the current. Sam has literal blood on his hands.

Dani and Leigh awaken in the mud. The end. Blast of horns.

Scorsese’s exaggerated camera angles and close-ups—the x-ray love-making scene between Sam and Leigh—lend a very noir-ish feel to the film, clearly deliberate. The lighting is spectacular, great camera movement, inventive scene composition, Dutch angles, the bizarrely overwrought skies (racing clouds, garish sunset, and improbably star-filled night), the familiar and ominous refrain of horns—it’s all nearly completely unseen and unheard of today.

Das Netz (1991) — 9/10

The Net − the Unabomber, LSD and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck in 2003 (YouTube)

This documentary was originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English.

In a way, the people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones I’d just seen in Cybertopia (YouTube). They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The same guy who cited the following,

“We create tools. And then, we mold ourselves to the use of them.”

Also refused to even discuss anything that the Unabomber had written because his manifesto was trash and he was a trash person and his ideas were trash and anyone who murders anyone doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Q.E.D. Also, he hadn’t actually read the manifesto because why bother? A true intellectual.

Stewart Brand is a much stronger thinker, capable of separating the medium (Kascinski) from the message (what are we doing with technology? What is it doing with us? Are we heading in a useful direction?)

Dammbeck received a letter from Ted:

“Florence, Colorado, 28 Februar.

“Sehr geehrter Herr Dammbeck

“Vielen dank für Ihren brief und Ihre fragen, die ich versuchen werde zu beantworten. Ich nutze diese Gelegenheit, um meine Kenntnisse der deutschen Sprache zu verbessern. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler. Vor 30 Jahren doch Mathematiker. Aber ich habe den größten teil von dem was ich über die Mathematik wusste vergessen.

“Ich meine, dass Utopien wahnsinnig und gefährlich sind, besonders die von einer technologischen gesellschaft. Die Technologie ist eine ganz eigenwillige und äußerst gefährliche macht, die uns dahin führt wohin sie uns führen muss. Das wird weder durch den Zufall noch die Willkür arroganter Bürokraten, Politiker, oder Wissenschaftler bestimmt, sondern das technologische System muss einfach menschliches verhalten seinen eigenen Erfordernissen anpassen. Das ist notwendig damit es funktionieren und sich immer weiter ausdehnen kann.

“Sie fragen mich auch einiges zum Manifesto. Alle veröffentlichten Versionen des Manifestos sind unrichtig, denn sie enthalten schwerwiegende Fehler. Wenn sie eine richtige version des Manifestos bekommen wollen, kann ich sie Ihnen liefern.”

There follows a long section on Norbert Wiener and the origin of cybernetics, arguably the disease that infects so many otherwise useful minds.

The next interview is with Larry Roberts, the guy who founded Arpanet, whose work was deeply linked to the U.S. military buildup in the Cold War. He also has nothing to discuss about Kascinski’s ideas.

“Roberts: He’s crazy. We have people like that in our society.

“Dammbeck: But he was a mathematician. He studied in Harvard.

“Roberts: Hitler was a painter. He studied in Vienna.

“Dammbeck: Have you read the manifesto?

“Roberts: [jokes] You mean, Mein Kampf? [seriously] No, I didn’t read it. I didn’t read Mein Kampf either.

“Roberts: What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the Al Qaeda. I’m afraid of cancer. But I don’t know enough. Even if we knew how to cure cancer, if we had more knowledge, then we wouldn’t be afraid of it.

“Dammbeck: How do you know that cancer is an illness? Krankheit? It’s an illness of modern society. It’s an illness of civilization.

“Roberts: Yeah, but someday, I believe will understand how to cure cancer. Or prohibit cancer. I believe that will happen long before we have an electronic battlefield or a machine that we can’t control.

“And, when we know how to cure or prohibit cancer, we will no longer be afraid of it. It’s a question of knowledge, of eliminating ignorance. Ignorance is a state of no knowledge. Ig-no-rance. It’s not stupidity. That’s something else. Ignorance. It causes fear.”

This is a wonderful segment that illustrates how un-self-aware most of these intelligent—and powerful—people are. He is incapable of learning anymore. He is incurious. He doesn’t even listen to Dammbeck’s question. He just repeats something I’m sure his wife (who lurks in the background) has heard him say a million times.

Knowledge is the savior. Sure, buddy. And let’s look at your prediction, 22 years later. Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have world-girdling data centers to write smutty haikus? Yes. Do we have electronic battlefields? Yes. Do we have machines that we can’t control? Well, someone controls them, but it’s not us. But I wouldn’t expect even the 2003 version of Roberts to have been able to grasp the nuance of that argument, or to be at-all willing to engage with it. He already knew everything.

The narrator:

“Was habe ich bisher? Ich habe einen ehemaligen Mathematiker über dessen Systemkritik keiner meiner Interviewpartner reden will und ich habe Ingenieure und Künstler die von Technologie besessen sind. All das gehört offensichtlich zu einem System dessen Konturen ich erst erahne. Anscheinend ein geniales Feedbacksystem [Rückkupplungssystem], dass jeden angriff und jede Störung umgehend als Energiezufuhr für seine weitere Perfektionierung nutzt. Wer braucht so etwas? Wer denkt sich so etwas aus?”

Another letter from Kascsinski:

“Als ich ihnen schrieb, dass der begriff einer Utopie wahnsinnig und gefährlich ist, meinte ich nicht, dass alle Utopien wahnsinnig gefährlich sind, sondern, vor allem, die Utopie, dass man eine Gesellschaft nach einem bestimmten idealen Muster erschaffen. Könnte Sie selbst zweifellos Ihre eigene Vorstellung von einer Utopie haben. Ein anderer mensch hat eine andere Vorstellung, die sehr verschieden von der irrigen sein kann. Würde es ihnen gefallen, dass er Ihnen seine Utopie aufzwingt? Haben sie das recht ihm ihre Utopie aufzuzwingen?”

Next is a historical segment about Heinz von Förster, who worked at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. He interviews Heinz, who is very, very old. Heinz speaks perfect German. They watch a video of him, another recent interview, where Heinz talks about how he’d learned the Tractatus Philosophicus by Wittgenstein by heart, as a child, and he’d made himself unausstehlich with citations from it during family discussions. Heinz is introspective and much more open than most of his American counterparts (except for Stewart Brand).

“Ich habe erkannt, im laufe meines Lebens, [dass] je mehr ich mich mit Physik beschäftigen, dass ich eigentlich ein meta-Physiker bin.”

It gets much better from there.

“von Förster: […] weil die Frage nicht beantwortbar ist. So, kommt es nur darauf an wie interessant ist die Geschichte die der erfindet, wie der entstanden ist.

“Dammbeck: Da ist man natürlich ganz nah bei der Kunst. Wenn also, dass es darum geht eine gute Geschichte zu erzählen, also eine poetische Geschichte.

“von Förster: Ja genau. Das ist die Sache. Es besteht ein Zweikampf oder Dreikampf oder einen Zehnkampf zwischen den verschiedenen Poeten.”

They discuss how our worldwide system of interacting machines are based on what he called Lückenhafte Theorien, where placeholders serve to cover up missing knowledge.

“Dammbeck: Aber es gibt doch irgendwo grenzen?

“von Förster: Eben nicht. Das ist das schöne. Da kann man immer wieder weiter.

“Dammbeck: In der Logik?

“von Förster: Genau.

“Dammbeck: Aber in der Realität?

“von Förster: Wo ist die Realität? Wo haben Sie die?”

Much later, he interviews one of Kascinski’s victims, who lost an eye to a mail bomb.

“Once a man is a murderer, I don’t give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know of him, is that he is a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering. And his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being.”

I’m gonna say it: That’s dumb. Yeah, he lost an eye. Kascinski took an eye from him. But a worse thing he did to that poor man is that he made him dumb. Ignorant. Information is information, it doesn’t matter whence it comes. I’m interested in any opinion, any formulation, if only to learn how I would counter it.

People find value in what Kascinski said. Just saying “DON’T” is stupid. It’s not going to lead to a world where people can read Kascinski, whose ideas are interesting—and which have gained more and more relevance to our dystopian reality—but whose acts were evil, without worshiping him.

That’s the problem. Everyone’s dumb. Everyone’s a fool. The people who can’t read him because they hate him, and the people who can’t understand what he writes without revering him. It’s all stupid. Except for this documentary. I very much liked it.

Donnie Brasco (1997) — 8/10

Lefty (Al Pacino) is an inveterate gambler and sergeant of sorts in a crime family. Don (Johnny Depp) is a jeweler. He inveigles his way into Lefty’s life, quickly setting himself up as his right-hand man. Don’s handler Tim Curley (Zeljko Ivanek) tells him to shave his mustache; funnily enough, Lefty had told him the same.

Don stops by at Lefty’s place to drop off his present—several hundred dollars—and gets the same present from Lefty. Lefty asks him to stay because Don told him he was an orphan, and he has neither wife not girlfriend. So he’s stuck there until Lefty’s done chatting. As he’s leaving, Lefty hits him up for a few hundred, taking his present back.

Donnie needs to get home to his wife in Queens, though. She has no idea what he does, other than he works for the FBI. He’s been undercover for two years. His three daughters are not at home, but his wife Maggie (Anne Heche) is. After fighting for a bit, they segue directly into make-up sex.

Lefty gets “sent for”.

“In our thing, you get sent for, you go in, you don’t come out. And it’s your best friend that does it.”

Nobody’s talking to Lefty. They’re driving with Sonny (Michael Madsen), Nicky (Bruno Kirby), and Bruno (Brian Tarantina). It’s a false alarm. Sonny just wanted to tell him that he’d moved up, that he’d been made a skipper. Sonny gives him a lion. The lion is in their car. “What the fuck am I gonna do with a lion?”

I love how Donnie’s always misunderstanding Lefty, letting him explain things to him. “Sometimes I think you got dropped on your head at the orphanage too many times.” This is great, because Lefty is dumb. He is just a dumb goombah. He seems to be less of a cold-blooded killer than he’d like his reputation of having iced 26 people to imply. Sonny, though, Sonny’s a loose cannon. Literally.

Brasco’s FBI contacts want him to start setting other people up, to expand the network, to “not miss any opportunities,” in particular, a connection in Florida. As usual, the FBI wants to make careers and they honestly don’t care how much damage they cause or how much crime they inspire to get there.

At a Japanese restaurant, he can’t take off his shoes because he keeps the wire in his boot. So he incites the others to beat the shit out of the maitre d’ for not letting them have their way and eat without taking their shoes off. The others were fine with taking their shoes off, but they backed Donnie up when they saw, approvingly, how racist he was. So the poor maitre d’ was beaten to a pulp to protect Donnie’s cover.

Sonny’s having trouble making the vig of $50K a week, We see his people bringing him a bunch of penny-ante shit that’s not even gonna make a dent.

Donnie says, “I got a friend down in Florida.” It’s not long before they’re in Miami. Dog races, tennis, water parks. The purple firebird. Richie Gazzo (Rocco Sisto) is a work of art. It cannot be ignored how much GTA games took their aesthetic nearly entirely from movies like this. I mean, GTA: Vice City looks just like this act in Miami.

In Miami, the FBI’s got a whole office set up in a motel. Tim Blake Nelson and Paul Giamatti are playing lowly, unnamed FBI technicians. They do get a scene with Depp, though, which is a good one. They talk about the meaning of Fuggedaboutit.

Nicky’s doing a drug deal. Each sees the other but doesn’t know that they’ve been spotted. Donnie’s on the phone with his wife but Lefty’s too concerned about getting the club deal for himself instead of Sonny. Sonny’s getting suspicious.

They’re on the boat with drug-dealer Trafficante (Val Avery), where Lefty thinks he’s going to get a break. But Sonny shows up and takes the deal for himself. Sonny talks to Donnie, taking him over: “you belong to me now.” He’s going to put Donnie in charge in Florida. Lefty’s shut out.

Being in Floria, Donnie misses his daughter’s First Communion. His wife changes the phone number.

Donnie almost gets made at the airport by a U.S. Attorney General, who approaches him. Donnie thinks quickly and knocks him out, telling Sonny that the fag grabbed his cock.

Donnie flies back to his family to learn that he’s getting a divorce. They’re in counseling. The company he keeps has rubbed off on him so much that he can’t even slip out of his Donnie Brasco role when he’s with Maggie.

Lefty’s son Tommy has overdosed. Donnie’s there for Lefty, in the hospital He should be in Florida, though.

The club’s up and running. Donnie did good. The opening night is lovely. The cops bust it up. Everybody gets arrested. Donnie suspects that the other idiot FBI agent in Florida didn’t bribe the local constabulary because he didn’t have budget for it. Lefty, though, he says that “there’s gotta be a snitch” because the cops got wind way too quickly. The snitch was Sonny Red, who coordinated with Trafficante to get them busted.

Sonny gets sent for. They drive out. Donnie’s gotta wait in the car.

Sonny Black gets the drop on Sonny Red. Nicky deals the coup de grace. It’s a massacre. They retrieve Donnie from the car. Lefty takes out Nicky (because they know he was making side drug deals and wasn’t giving them a cut). Donnie’s left to help them saw all those guys to pieces. Lefty, later, in the car, says,

“Nicky was a rat because Sonny Black says he was a rat. Who the fuck am I? Who am I? I’m a spoke on a wheel. And so was he. And so are you.”

Donnie stops checking in with the FBI; it’s been three weeks. Lefty gives him his shot at getting to be a made guy. Donnie’s back at home, looking for a bag with $300k in it. Maggie tells him, “you’re becoming like them, you know that?” for which he wallops her across the face.

“Maggie: Did you ever once ask yourself how I make it through my days? Hmm? I pretend I”m a widow. With medals and scrapbooks…and memories. I pretend you’re dead. That’s how my life makes sense to me. Just go away. And stay away. Why do you hate me when I love you so much?

“Joe/Donnie: You think I hate you? I don’t hate you. This job is eating me alive.I can’t breather anymore. And if I come out, this guy Lefty dies. They’re gonna kill him because he vouched for me, because he stood up for me. I live with that every day. That’s the same thing as if I put the bullet in his head myself, you understand? I spent all these years, trying to be the good guy, you know? The man in the white fuckin’ hat. For what? For nothing. I’m not becoming like them, Maggie. I am them.”

He kisses he on the back of her head and leaves.

They’re at the pier, waiting for Sonny Red’s son Bruno to show up so they can pop him. Donnie asks Lefty to just leave this life, buy a boat, take his wife Annette (Ronnie Farer) and just leave. Just get away. “You think I’m fuckin’ Rockefeller? You think I got boat money?” Donnie says, “What if I could give you boat money?” Lefty looks at him, then pulls out a scrap of newspaper. “I want you to look at it very carefully and I want you to think very carefully about what you say to me.” The article writes that the boat that Donnie had procured in Florida was a boat that the FBI had previously seized. It was an FBI boat, an “Abscam” boat.

“If you’re a rat, then I’m the biggest fuckin’ mutt in the history of the Mafia.”

Lefty believes him.

“Did I say you was a rat? I can’t believe you brought that up. I never said you was a rat. I’m your best friend.”

Just as Lefty’s urging him to make his first kill, the FBI busts up the party, pulling Donnie out. Lefty’s yelling at him not to say anything. “Don’t tell ‘em nothin’, Donnie. Don’t say nothing! There’ll be a mouthpiece there in 24 hours. You’re all right!” Meanwhile, Donnie’s telling the FBI agents, “No, no, no. Fuck you, it’s not over. I’m not coming out.” He doesn’t want to come out because he knows that Lefty’s going to die.

The other FBI agents visit Sonny Black and let him know that Donnie Brasco was a plant and that they can turn state’s evidence anytime they want.

“Sonny Black: Can you believe those fuckin’ guys? There’s no way Donnie’s an agent.
Pauly: It’s a nice bluff.
Lefty: That boat was a setup. They set the boat up. Then we think Donnie’s a rat.
Sonny Black: Almost had me goin’, if you didn’t know Donnie.
Lefty: Yeah, if you didn’t know Donnie.”

At home, Lefty’s watching TV. He gets a phone call. He’s gotta go out.

“Annette: So late?
Lefty: What am I gonna do? Who knows with these people. Honey, don’t wait up for me tonight. Nah, I don’t know how long I’m gonna be. Hey, listen to me: if Donnie calls, tell him, tell him, uh, if it was going to be anyone, I’m glad it was him. All right? Look how beautiful you look. Goodbye, babe.”

He leaves everything of value, including his gold cross on a chain. Annette gets everything.

Bang.

Joe D. Pistone got a medal, a $500 check, and a one-minute “press” conference with only his family in attendance.. “Joe? Joe, it’s over. C’mon, honey, let’s go home.”

This movie’s very good. but it’s also pretty long.. The acting is great all around. I had no inkling until the end that this was a true story about Joseph D. Pistone. I guess that explains why it was so long—they didn’t want to leave anything out. It’s kind of funny because Pacino played the undercover cop in a similar movie called Serpico..

Sandman S02 (2025) — 4/10

I watched one episode of this season and it was so boring. The direction, the dialogue, the acting—it’s all so wooden and terrible. I was going to tough it out but I have a million other things to watch, so I’m tapping out early. Morpheus is going to back to Hell and I couldn’t care less. He’s so morose and lackluster. All of the scenes are so obviously bullshit CGI, even the easily mocked-up indoor ones.

It’s all so unimaginative. Star Trek used styrofoam and tinsel and no-one cared because the acting, story, and dialogue were entrancing. Stop spending your entire budget on CGI bullshit. Stop deliberately trying to make everyone hate Desire with their flaunting about and being an absolute asshole so that they can pretend to be offended afterward. This is ridiculous.

Sorry, Alan Moore. Even the first season was a bit of a slog, stretched out as it was. This season has already stretched five minutes of exposition into a whole episode. I’m out.

Road to Perdition (2002) — 7/10

The Sullivan men are at a funeral. The coffin sits on a bed of ice. The corpse has coins on its eyes. It is 1931.

Young Michael goes upstairs to get Rooney’s jacket, only to find his son Connor (Daniel Craig) relaxing there. He sends the boy away. Below, the speeches begin. The corpse’s brother Finn McGovern (Ciarán Hinds) gives a drunken speech that threatens to veer into offending Rooney Sr. They cart him off Rooney Sr. tells Connor that he’s to take Michael with him when he “talks to him.”

Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) loves his mother Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), but he reveres his father (Tom Hanks), though he knows he’s a dangerous man. Michael Sr. is, in fact, a brutal enforcer for John Rooney (Paul Newman).

Young Sullivan sneaks into the car to see what his father does for a living. He finds out when he watches his father cap Finn in cold blood. Connor drunkenly lets loose with his Tommy gun, for no reason other than to make noise and be a pain in the ass. The boy flees into the rain, where his father finds him. He takes his son home. “Does mom know?” Mom knows.

The next morning, Rooney Sr. meets Michael Jr. on the way to school to tell him to keep his mouth shut—basically, I mean, it was a veiled threat, but what else was Rooney doing there? They’re all working hard to protect Michael Sr.‘s position in the organization because he’s so valued. As Rooney talks to Michael Sr., we see Jr. beating the living hell out of another kid in school. Having seen his father murder someone has taken its toll, I guess.

Michael is on his next contract. Connor declines to accompany him. “Ich habe Hausarrest.” “Alles klar.” Michael arrives, and executes Calvino (Doug Spinuzza) and his bodyguard. The note he’d handed to Calvino, which Connor had given him, read, “Kill Sullivan and all your debts are paid.” Oh.

Michael Jr. rides his bike home to hear two shots fired. Annie and his younger brother are gone. Connor leaves their home. Michael Sr. arrives to find Jr. in the dining room, like a ghost. Michael Sr. finds the bodies upstairs. He wastes no time, getting himself and his remaining son out of the house. “Dieses Haus ist nicht mehr unseres Zuhause. Es ist nur noch ein leeres Gebäude.”

This is a very dark movie, in tone, story, and appearance. It almost looks like it’s in black-and-white sometimes, especially the nighttime, wintry scenes.

They head for Chicago. He is there to talk to Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci). Nitti cannot help him because he’s going to protect his own interests first, and then those of Rooney. John Rooney and son Connor are both there. John sends Connor away, while he and Nitti decide what to do. Rooney says, “Gott, nein. Nicht der Junge.” Nitti says that he knows just who he’ll get for the job, then.

We meet photojournalist Maguire (Jude Law), who works very … inventively. He tends to manufacture murders and then photographs them for money. Nitti engages his services. He is a serial killer for hire.

The two remaining Sullivans drive to Perdition. They do not go to the funeral of the two dead ones. Maguire, who is manic-looking but is also a very clever investigator, follows. He finds Sullivan in a diner, eating dinner. Sullivan is immediately suspicious. Their initial verbal tango is great.

“Maguire: Bezahlt zu werden, für das was man gern tut, ist das nicht der Traum?
Sullivan: Könnte man sagen.”

It keeps getting better. By the end, Sullivan is sweating. He palms a knife and heads for the bathroom, pretending to be a lot drunker than he is. Maguire waits for the police officer to leave, pulls a pistol, and turns just in time to see Sullivan driving off. He runs out, finds a knife in his tire, and puts a couple of well-placed shots into the back windshield, then kills the cop.

The next day, Sullivan Jr. learns to drive. A synchro-free clutch can’t be easy for someone who can barely reach the pedals. Sullivan Sr. robs a bank, nice and quiet, taking only Capone’s money. He robs several banks. His son always playing getaway driver, always getting better. They repaint the car, the back seat full of money. They’re a good team.

The next target is Alexander Rance (Dylan Baker). Sullivan is slowly learning how rich Rooney actually is. Maguire’s on his way, having seen Rance in the window. They exchange shots. Maguire kills Rance through the wall, and Sullivan shoots Maguire in the face, possibly the eye. Maguire clips him in the arm during the getaway. Gunshots wounds in 1931 were no laughing matter, not like they are now, where you can get shot a dozen times and everything’s fine the next day. Sullivan Jr. stops at a farm and gets a couple to take them in. They pull the bullet and disinfect. He nurses his dad back to health over several days (or weeks? It’s unclear).

Sullivan discovers that Connor has been embezzling from his father. They leave the farm, recompensing the couple handsomely. He rushes to tell Rooney, convinced that this means that he will be absolved. Rooney already knew. Rooney knew that the men he was telling Sullivan to kill were only dying to cover his son’s debts. Sullivan learns that his savior had always been a bad man, incapable of saying no to his son, no matter how much damage it does to anyone else.

Later, in the rain, in a ghostly scene, Michael takes out everyone, leaving an immobile Rooney Sr. alive. He walks out of the shadows like an avenging angel, a silhouette in the pouring rain. Rooney: “Ich bin froh, dass du es tust.”

Connor is next. Nitti agrees to it to end the feud. Connor’s in the tub. The shots are off-screen but the swinging bathroom door with the mirror on it to reveal the aftermath is inspired. Immediately after, Sullivan Jr. sits in a room, waiting for his dad to return. He’s on the right half of the screen; his dad arrives on the left half, coming up the hallway.

Maguire is still out there.

They are in Perdition. It’s sunny at the beach. It’s colorful. A dog barks. It’s a damned golden retriever. Goldies, ammirite? They make the sun shine. The music is hopeful. Michael stands at the large window in the white, white living room of his sister’s house. The surf comes in, gently, again and again. His son plays with the dog.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Maguire shoots Sullivan in the back.

Maguire sets up his camera. His face is all fucked-up, but his eye is mostly fine. That bowler hat is something else. “Bitte lächeln.”

Michael Jr. comes up behind him. “Komm schon, Michael, gib mir die Kanone.”

Bang.

“Michael Jr.: Ich konnte es nicht tun.
Michael Sr. Ich weiss.”

Everyone is dead but Michael Jr. and the dog. Oh no, wait, the couple at the farm are still alive. Michael Jr. returns to them, with the dog and all of his money in tow.

If this movie had been 30 minutes shorter, I would have give it an extra star. It was a little too languorous on some scenes, it repeated a bit too much. But some scenes were really lovely.

I watched it in German.

Jump Cut (2024) — 8/10

This is a fun and well-made sci-fi short about an actress in her early 30s named Maya (Lucy Walters), who’s struggling to get her feet under her. We watch the world beat her down, bit by bit, although she seems to be quite good at what she does. She scrolls through job ads, all requesting “girls” in their “early 20s”, which she will never be again. She feels like she’s “running out of time.”

She answers a job ad for an experimental film that’s looking for a woman in her 30s.

She presses “submit.”

The doorbell rings.

It’s Cyril (Laura Esterman), with director Philippe Wokozi (Jamie Jackson). They are there to hire her. You see the incredible desperation in her face, wanting to believe that she’s finally getting her break, but realizing that all of the alarm bells are going off, but not wanting to miss out on a possible break …

The poor and desperate are so easy to scam because they have so little to lose. They’ve been down so long that their desperation no longer whispers, it roars.

It begins.

She loses time. Minutes, hours, weeks.

She ends up in an ethereal theater, watching the film of her life that Wokozi has summarized and then … the doorbell rings.

She is older now, in the role of Cyril before, recruiting the next girl.

Good pacing, good lighting, good editing, good sound design, good acting, good soundtrack, and a good story.

Die drei Musketiere (1948) — 7/10

D’Artagnan (Gene Kelly) is a gifted fencer from a country village. He makes his way to Paris on the ugliest horse imaginable to become a musketeer. The movie starts as a slapstick comedy, then moves on from there.

On his journey, he meets three awful swordsmen guarding Lady de Winter (Lana Turner, who is stunning). In Paris, D’artagnan meets and offends each of the three musketeers, Athos (Van Heflin), Aramis (Robert Coote), and Porthos (Gig Young) and ends up with a duel with each of them, at noon, one, and two in the afternoon. Richelieu’s troops attack them and the four of them fight them off, with D’Artagnan proving to be the bester fencer of them all. King Louis XIII (Frank Morgan) yells at them, but rewards them handsomely.

This is a comedy, a rather broad one at times. It is also an action movie, with incredible stunts and feats of derring-do, mostly on the part of Gene Kelly, who I had not realized was the Buster Keaton/Jackie Chan of his time. He is impressive, incredibly athletic and physically gifted. I’d only seen him in Singin’ in the Rain and thought he was only a singer/dancer.

When her home is attacked by Richelieu’s troops, D’Artagnan—with a little help from his footman, or secondaire Planchet (Keenan Wynn)—comes to the rescue of Constance (June Allyson), the landlord’s daughter, who lives below him. They quickly fall in love, but she won’t let him accompany her to a rendezvous because she’s meeting the Duke of Buckingham (John Sutton), who’s not supposed to be in France. The Duke meets with Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury), where they profess their mutual love.

Richelieu (Vincent Price) meets with de Winter—resplendent in green—and they machinate together. They want those jewels that the Queen has. The musketeers are to defend their journey from England. There are a lot of sword-fighting scenes and then they are waylaid along an enfilade, with Aramis falling wounded by the wayside. A bridge is out, guns are fired, Troops fall from their hoses. D’Artagnan leaps a chasm with his horse. Richelieu’s troops ride down an impossibly steep ravine. They’re all at the beach. More sword-fighting. Some are leaping from pretty ridiculous heights.[2]

This is very exciting; the action scenes are very good for even now, but in 1948 this must have been out of this world. No wonder Jackie Chan spent his career making movies like this.

D’Artagnan makes it to England to pick up the dozen jewels, but there are only 10 in the case. Richelier and de Winter—this time in purple!—have the other two. Porthos cannot accompany him because he’d been stabbed in the ass while he’d been distracted by a beautiful woman. Aramis is also useless because he’s back with his countryside woman, while Athos is holed up in a cellar, deep, deep, deep in his cups. He’s the least useless, though, so he’s forced to recover and acocompany D’Artagnan to Paris.

Cut to outside the palace. D’Artagnan scales the walls like he’s Spiderman, then flits from rooftop to rooftop like he’s not bound by gravity. He tumbles through an open window, crashing to the floor and trailing several banners—remember, it’s a comedy, so there are pratfalls—and hands the box of jewels to Constance, who brings them to the Queen in time to thwart Richelieu’s plans to subvert her influence with the King.

Richelieu has Constance kidnapped. D’Artagnan confronts him—resplendent in purple himself! And Richelieu is holding a and stroking a cat, as Blofeld would—but D’Artagnan is not to trade his life for hers but to give his sword to Richelieu in exchange. Richelieu gives D’Artagnan into the hands of de Winter—bright, bright green—to prepare him for his guard, like, whatever that means. This is the same thing that his returned comrades think: they don’t believe that he’d behaved himself with de Winter. He protests that he loves Constance.

Kitty (Patricia Medina) is de Winter’s servant and she seems to be in love with the handsome D’Artagnan—everyone seems to be falling in love with him. He embroils her in his plan to present himself to de Winter as her lover Graf de Warden, which is why he insisted that they extinguish all the candles, so that she can’t see who he really is.

As Athos and the others predicted, he falls in love with her, forgetting Constance completely.. It turns out that de Winter is Athos’s ex-wife.

“Das Geschöpf ist meiner Frau Flieh dieses Weib wie die Peste. Dieses todbringende, teuflische Urbild des Bösen!”

Now D’Artagnan visits de Winter as himself. He’s wearing the ring she’d given him when he’d posed as de Warden. He shows her the ring, thinking that their mutual love make her understand why he’d fooled her. She does not understand. At all. She tries to kill him with scissors. He discovers the brand on her shoulder that Athos had told him about. It signifies that she’s an ex-con, apparently.

D’Artagnan returns to his home to find Constance. I shit you not: he proposes to her. Like, on the same day. They’re married, cuddling, and then she leaves. “Wo immer wir sind … wir sind beisamen.” OK, sure. But that was the shortest honeymoon ever, and all they talked about was how he can get de Warden’s forgiveness. Constance arrives at another castle, in safety, knowing that D’Artagnan will be fighting the very next day. Things move quickly, I guess.

OK, the fighting has started and, somehow, Richelieu thinks that the three musketeers are working for him. Athos confronts de Winter—Charlotte—and gets the “Vollmacht” for free passage to England. They send Planchet to meet with the Duke of Buckingham.

Lady de Winter manages to put her foot in it, getting herself caught in a lie and thrown in the dungeon. It’s a pretty fancy dungeon, though. With Constance watching over her, de Warden will con her into letting her free. As Athos puts it, “Satan bewacht von einer Engel, ” but she’s not falling for it, but her heart is too good; she can’t be sure that it’s all just show.

Constance brings de Warden a knife. instead of using it kill herself, she stabs Constance, and then kills her guard, and Buckingham. D’Artagnan finds Constance and she dies in his arms. The musketeers track her down, finding her smiling smugly before her mirror. They capture her, and hand her over to the executioner (Mickey Simpson). She begs for forgiveness, to which Athos replies,

“Wie oft in deinem Leben hast du um Gnade gebeten und sie erhalten? Und sie mit Blut vergolten? Wie viel hast du grausam um ihr Leben betrogen, um MItleid, Hoffnung und Liebe gebracht? Was gibt dir ein Recht darauf zu hoffen? Du könntest uns noch täuschen. Wir können dich nicht verzeihen. Wir könnenn es nicht, und wir dürfen es nicht. [He kisses her one last time] Meine geliebte Frau.”

She dies off-camera. They ride. They come to an inn. Another trap. A final marvelously choreographed and filmed fight scene. Gene Kelly is amazing. He standing-jumps over a table, slides across another, then parkours up a wall to a second-floor balcony. It’s 1948 and that was all one shot. I don’t see any cables. Amazing. I only just realized just how much Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya’s appearance was modeled after D’Artagnan.

Reinforcements appear on horse, and the musketeers are captured. Richelieu tries to convict them, but is tripped up by his own paper of passage, which allowed them to do whatever they thought best, signed by him. He is forced to free them by the King, or else admit that there is no rule of law.[3] The end.

The costumes and colors are incredible in this film. I took a point off because it was quite long, and somewhat repetitive, though always entertaining. I watched it in German.

The Grudge (2019) — 6/10

A lady comes home from Japan with a grudge. Actually, it’s a demon-ghost that infects her home and infects every single person who sets foot into the home. It kills them all and retains their ghosts in the home. This movie has a ton of jump-scares but some of the non-jump ones are just kind of gross. A bunch of times, someon turns a light off and the monster is there; then they turn it on and it’s gone. There are some good practical effects mixed with CGI.

Karen (Andrea Riseborough) is getting over the death of her husband, who she lost young to cancer. They move to another town. She’s a police officer, and she takes a job with the local constabulary.. Her first case is a car that they’ve discovered in the woods, its driver long dead.

She investigates the house and discovers that her current partner’s former partner had shot himself in the face after having gone into the house. He was investigating a couple of realtors, who’d murder-suicided. They were trying to sell the house for the lady from Japan, who’d murder-suicided her daughter and husband. The next couple was an older one, a lady with dementia and a terminal disease. She murder-suicided his ass. The lady in the car was a hospice caregiver who’d been there. The house killed her too. This is all told in interleaved flashbacks, almost like they’d spilled film canisters across the editing-room floor.

She visits her partner’s ex-partner in the mental asylum. He tells her that she’s doomed. He claws his own eyes out to stop seeing the demons.

Karen is going to end this, though. She’s pouring gasoline all over the house. She tells her son to stay in the car. Her son shows up in the house. She asks him a question that he always knows how to answer. He’s mute. It’s not her son. It’s the house, trying to protect itself. She lights that shit on fire—having guessed correctly.

They move again. She send her son off to school. Big hug goodbye. He answers from the other room, “I’m going to school Mom.” Boom. The lady from Japan appears out of nowhere and drags her by the hair down the hall. Awesome jump scare. Best one for last. The end.

U-571 (2000) — 6/10

This movie describes a fun action-movie scenario that never happened, but it totallly looks like it happened. And it kind of did happen, but not at all in this way, and certainly not with U.S.-American protagonists. A lot of people had a problem with that, but I only learned about the uproar after I’d already watched the movie. It was fine. I didn’t notice as many plotholes or historical inconsistencies because I was cheerfully learning new French words the whole time. I had no idea how many maritime words in English come from the French: “keel” (quille); “poop (deck); stern” (poupe); “prow” (proue) and so on.

Anyway, Tyler (Matthew McConaughey) has been told that he’s not ready for his own command, though he’s an excellent second-in-command. He’s not especially stoked about this kind of back-handed compliment, but he’s a good sailor—he grins and bears it. He embarks on a mission with his beloved captain Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) and his Chief (Harvey Keitel) to capture an Enigma device on a German submarine.

They locate the submarine, pretending to be German using literally one of their crew—Wentz (Jack Noseworthy)—who speaks German. He speaks it quite well, though, so that, as they approach in their raft, the Germans are fooled long enough to get close enough to machine-gun them all to death. They take over the submarine with more derring-do (cracking the entrance, etc.) and locate the Enigma device as well as many German crew members who give themselves up without a fight.

They’ve packed up all of the stuff they want to steal, as well as their prisoners, and gotten most of it into rafts and heading for their own sub…when a German warship appears and torpedoes their own sub, utterly destroying it and killing nearly everyone in transit. They manage to rescue a few people, as well as the Enigma machine. Oh, and also a German, whom they take prisoner, but who will—being the dastardly and ungrateful enemy he is—constantly take advantage of their magnanimity in not killing a prisoner by sabotaging their further efforts, often with nearly fatal effect.

So now they’re in a German submarine—where only two of them can read anything, well, three including the German but he’s going to lie through his teeth, so good luck with that—and they’ve got to get through U-Boat-infested waters in order to deliver the Enigma device to Great Britain.

They do this, of course. They do all of the submarine-movie things.

• They look up at the ceiling a lot, listening hard.
• They have to repair leaks, repair equipment, and clear blockages.
• They have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time in cold water, sometimes completely submerged in it, in tight tunnels.
• They have to take the submarine deeper than they’re ever gone before. (They grudgingly admire German engineering.)
• They have to contend with having only one propellor.
• They have only one torpedo but can’t fire it until a whole bunch of other things are resolved.
• They stop their sinking.
• They have to contend with rising too quickly.

The German ship on the surface discovers that they are a U.S.-American crew on one of their U-Boats. They eventually blow up it up with their one remaining torpedo, but their U-Boat is also wounded fatally, so they abandon it and are rescued from their rafts by allied forces.

I didn’t recognize anyone else, but apparently Jon Bon Jovi played Emmett. I don’t know which generic sailor he played.

I watched it in mostly French, with a bit of German, with French subtitles.