Greyhound (2020)

There is a tense cat-and-mouse tension running through Greyhound. This is the story of a war ship captain who is tasked with helping safely transport a number of other ships across the Atlantic during WWII when a wolfpack of German U-Boats approach. This concise 90 minutes are packed with all the stress and drama of the moment, one where you can't be sure what you see, where the stakes are life and death. And the film works when it is in the heights of this game. 

One of the problems of war movies is how uniforms make all the characters look the same, making them often blend together and make it hard to build emotional connection to anyone in particular. Greyhound suffers from this a bit which I will get to, but overcomes it in a few ways. Hanks, who wrote the screenplay as well as stars in it, centres the film as the captain and bring the sort of gravitas necessary to such a story. But what he does interestingly as a screen writer is focus on certain characters (like the boat's chef) that help humanize what could have quite easily been a very clinical story about hit or miss, Battleship as a movie basically. Instead, the film finds a way through a few of the characters, to help you be able to feel the lives at risk and that helps. While most of the cast do blend together, there are those few that help give the film some human faces.

The runtime also helps keep the story tight and tense. With very little time the film must focus on its plot points and keep the story moving. This help keeps the momentum going and keeps the level of involvement high. But when the film tries to stop for some contemplative moments, it looses some of this momentum. There is a funeral scene which doesn't have the impact it might need to as the characters weren't necessarily built enough for us to have the emotional reaction to their loss, but also the film doesn't balance this with the action well. It's almost as if the film, with it's short timeline, should have focused more on one aspect of the story to truly maximize it's power.

And I'm not sure the film does much else to differentiate it from most other movies of its ilk. Once it's over it doesn't offer much which sets it apart. I've struggled to find something in recent war movies that feels original and Greyhound doesn't have anything here either. While the film is engaging as hell while you watch it, it also feels like it slips away a bit when it's over.

Greyhound came along during the COVID epidemic and it was moved from a big screen release to a streaming one. Apparently Hanks was quite disappointed this didn't hit the big screen. There is a lot this film may have benefited from being on a larger screen. But the story may not have offered much more anyway. I guess we'll never know.

Greyhound is good for what it is. Hanks is, not surprisingly, very strong in his role. And when it ups the ante to make us feel, like a punch in the gut, the stakes and the odds, it can be quite gripping. It struggles to do this always but when it does it truly does.

Greyhound
Starring: Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Shue, Rob Morgan, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo
Director: Aaron Schneider
Writer: Tom Hanks