U-571 parades itself as history, but it plays more like a submarine matinee in a military haircut. While the film borrows its premise from a real-life operation—a 1941 mission in which the Royal Navy’s HMS Bulldog forced the German U-110 to the surface and allowed British sailors to board it and seize an Enigma machine with codebooks—this film credits Americans for the deed instead of the British. This was a distortion so brazen that the U.S. President at the time, Bill Clinton, during a speech to veterans, felt obliged to underline that the real heroes were British.
As pulp, though, it works. Matthew McConaughey plays Lt. Andrew Tyler, the junior officer shoved into command due to his ability to bark in German. He expresses initial doubt in his role, but eventually adopts a more steely resolve. It’s the typical military-leader character arc. Bill Paxton plays his starchy superior officer, while Harvey Keitel trudges in with eternal gravitas as the gunner’s mate. Jon Bon Jovi, of all people, shows up as a chief petty officer who is eventually sucked through a flooding hatch and never spoken of again. (I suppose one could say that submarines are very slippery when wet.)
Director Jonathan Mostow knows how to get the sweat and steel right. There are men hunched in narrow tubes, straining at sonar pings that sound like doom. But what’s missing here is the madness. You can feel the pressure but never the claustrophobia. For that, you’d have to look back to the classics of the genre: Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October. The movie also could have played up the espionage thread—disguised warships, codebooks snatched before the Germans knew what hit them. That could have given the film more of a Mission: Impossible pulse. But instead, the movie falls back on boilerplate tropes: countdowns, noble sacrifices, explosions timed to the last second. (To be fair, the real-life event didn’t ring much like Mission: Impossible either, but as long as the movie was playing fast and loose with facts, why not enhance it a bit?)
As history, U-571 is fraudulent. But as submarines, sweat, and saltwater pulp, it’s seaworthy enough. It goes down smoothly with a heap of gooey popcorn. And make sure you don’t bring a talkative historian with you, unless you’d prefer to get an earful of lecture over gawking at McConaughey’s jawline.