U-571

U-571

Directed by Jonathan Mostow. Starring Matthew McConaghey, Harvey Keitel, Bill Paxton, Jon Bon Jovi

'Twas with a grim and heavy heart that I entered the cinema, having read Jon Bon Jovi's earnest effervescing about how U-571 manages to cut it as a Das Boot for the 21st century - the latter film easily tops my All-Time Most Hated list, and the prospect of a mega-budget remake did little to raise my spirits on screening's eve.

As it turns out, U-571 is an entirely serviceable and intermittently exciting standard submarine-yarn, which is difficult to fault on any reasonable level when you've factored in the audience demographic, the quality of cast, the time of year etc. etc.

Though relentlessly formulaic, it's also highly accomplished in pure crowd-pleasing terms - and as one of the very few action flicks this summer that's actually contained something bordering on action, the film must be reluctantly applauded for sheer competence.

Though it's loosely based on a factual incident in May 1941 which actually involved the British navy rather than America's, several elements of the story have been rewritten for US box-office purposes, much to the amusing annoyance of Royal Navy vets and Britmag film critics. Matt McConaghey portrays a US Navy lieutenant who leads a raid on a U-boat for the purposes of capturing the German code-breaking Enigma machine - the mission goes according to plan until the Yanks' own sub is destroyed, thus forcing the crew to commandeer the eponymous less-than-pristine Kraut vessel.

Cue a series of well-executed (if not strikingly original) set-pieces: life-threatening depth charges, squabbling between the US crew, overwrought buddy-buddy male-bonding and all the old reliables. Our naval heroes also make the standard war-movie mistake of leaving a German prisoner alive, resulting in the inevitable escaped Nazi wreaking havoc on the sub.

While some of the ensemble cast are so thinly fleshed-out that you can barely differentiate between them, the leads do the business with undeniable efficiency: Harvey Keitel is suitably stoic as the engineering chief, while McConaghey puts in his best turn since Dazed & Confused, exuding a genuine sense of someone ordinary grappling with the extraordinary. The action scenes themselves achieve a perfect blend of suspense, tension and chaos, and very little time is wasted on irrelevant sub-plots, which is something of a departure for the genre.

I wouldn't dream of misleading you into expecting a classic: U-571 offers absolutely nothing by way of brain stimulation, and is every bit as predictable as you may have suspected. It's also likely to lose much of its effectiveness on the small screen, and there is the drawback of having to look at Jon Bon Jovi for two hours - but as Friday-night popcorn, U-571 is the equal of anything this summer's had to offer.