On DVD/Blu-ray: THE HOMESMAN (2014); V/H/S: VIRAL (2014); and BAD TURN WORSE (2014)

THE HOMESMAN
(France/US - 2014)

In the small frontier town of Loup in the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, three women have gone insane: Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter) suffers a breakdown after being unable to conceive a child and watching her husband (David Dencik) throw her just-deceased mother's corpse out in a heavy snowstorm before it starts stinking; Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto), a mother of three, tosses her newborn baby into an outhouse pit; and 19-year-old Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) loses her three children over three days to diphtheria. Rev. Dowd (John Lithgow) has decided to send them away to receive special care and treatment at a hospital in Iowa run by Altha Carter (Meryl Streep), the wife of a prominent Methodist minister. The trip is at least five weeks away and the women's husbands (there's also William Fichtner as Theoline's, and Jesse Plemons as Arabella's) are either unable or unwilling to make the journey, so Loup spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) volunteers. Cuddy moved to the area from New York, owns a large piece of land, and contributes to the welfare of Loup but is still gossiped about as she's been unable to land a husband. Now resorting to proposing marriage to men strictly as a business deal, the lonely Cuddy is repeatedly turned down for being "too bossy and too plain-looking." Looking for purpose in a life that's left her "uncommonly alone," Cuddy agrees to transport the three women across the Missouri River into Iowa, and finds an unwilling partner in a man calling himself George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones). A scheming claim jumper, Briggs made some enemies and Cuddy finds him strung up in a noose and left for dead, kept alive only by sheer luck as he's managed to keep the horse holding him there from bolting. Cuddy cuts him down and offers him $300 and a jug of whiskey to help with the journey and provide protection from various threats and obstacles that may arise.

Based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout, THE HOMESMAN was directed and co-written by Jones, and it turns into an interesting companion piece with his 2005 feature directing debut THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA (also, like THE HOMESMAN, co-produced by unlikely Jones pal Luc Besson). Both films--and tangentially, Jones' 2011 HBO film THE SUNSET LIMITED--share the common themes of death, honor, and redemption, but THE HOMESMAN is another beast altogether. Stunningly shot by Rodrigo Prieto, it finds Jones in auteur mode, with nearly every shot intricately staged and precisely framed as exquisite works of art. There's a Clint Eastwood aesthetic in his depiction of the west that recalls UNFORGIVEN (1992), and Jones not only takes time to build the characters but also, like Kelly Reichardt's minimalist MEEK'S CUTOFF (2011), is a stickler for harsh realism. THE HOMESMAN dives into the arduous obstacles and unpleasant realities of frontier life, the very realities--disease, isolation, environment--that turns three women into "cuckoo clocks" and the five-week journey into a months-long ordeal. This is an offbeat and thoroughly unique western, anchored by two terrific performances from Jones and Swank, and it's a film that would seem to have been a natural hit with audiences until you actually see it. Between this and THREE BURIALS, Jones has proven himself to be a gifted storyteller and a challenging filmmaker unconcerned with commercial appeal, and a lot of THE HOMESMAN is just too weird to play on 3000 screens and be the next OPEN RANGE or APPALOOSA sleeper hit (it's probably the best western since John Hillcoat's brutal 2006 western THE PROPOSITION). Lionsgate didn't seem to have any idea what to do with this, releasing it under its arthouse Roadside Attractions banner and only rolling it out on 220 screens. From the situations that arise--namely a whopper of an unexpected plot turn that completely shifts gears about 2/3 of the way in, and Briggs' ultimately surreal and nightmarish run-in with an erudite and dismissive hotelier (James Spader)--and the sly way Marco Beltrami's score vacillates between the grand, sweeping accompaniment you'd expect to hear in a John Ford western to the eerie and unsettlingly discordant piano and percussion sounds during the darker moments, THE HOMESMAN is a western that consistently defies genre expectations while utilizing standard tropes like Briggs' eventual redemption still not altering his status as an outsider--think of the way John Wayne's Ethan Edwards stands outside that door at the end of THE SEARCHERS, an unsympathetic and violent man who finds salvation in bringing his family back together but still remains distanced from that family, always and forever an outcast no matter how heroic he may be. Jones' George Briggs remains an enigma--it's clearly not his real name and we never learn about his obvious outlaw past, but he does what he's been paid to do and the journey, with all its ugly brutality and outright horror, is his redemption. Therein lies Jones' niche in the western genre: he's a John Ford purist at heart in a nihilistic Sam Peckinpah world. Also with Barry Corbin, Tim Blake Nelson, and Hailee Steinfeld (TRUE GRIT), THE HOMESMAN is bold and uncompromising, quirky and unpredictable, and one of the great undiscovered films of 2014. (R, 123 mins)


V/H/S: VIRAL
(US - 2014)

The third entry in the horror anthology franchise is not only the worst, but it also might be the worst portmanteau since that pair of slapped-together GEORGE A. ROMERO PRESENTS DEADTIME STORIES releases from a few years ago. Making its predecessors look like DEAD OF NIGHT and CREEPSHOW by comparison, V/H/S: VIRAL is a sloppy, incoherent, unwatchable disaster, with a wraparound story that has nothing to do with the events we see in the stories that unfold. DEADGIRL director Marcel Sarmiento handled the wraparound, "Vicious Circles," which deals with a would-be viral video dickbag who's fighting with his girlfriend but splits to follow a car chase on TV that speeds by his house. "Dante the Great," directed by Gregg Bishop (DANCE OF THE DEAD), is about an egomaniacal, murderous magician (Justin Welborn), whose magic is powered by his haunted cloak, and is notable for the land-speed record it sets in ditching its faux-doc concept to go for straight narrative. TIMECRIMES director Nacho Vigalondo helms "Parallel Monsters," where a guy (Gustavo Salmerin) encounters his doppelganger, at which time they agree to swap universes for 15 minutes but it's hardly a harmless visit. Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead direct "Bonestorm," where a bunch of skaters head to Tijuana and run afoul of a south-of-the-border death cult, with the entire segment shot almost exclusively with helmet-cams with occasional switches to first-person shooter POV shots. A fifth segment, "Gorgeous Vortex," was cut from the film just before release, with the explanation being that it slowed down the pace and changed the tone of the project, but it's included on the DVD and Blu-ray as a bonus segment at the conclusion of the actual film. Directed by Todd Lincoln (the completely forgettable THE APPARITION), it's an impenetrable, bizarre, dialogue-free fever dream that's completely pretentious bullshit that doesn't get a pass simply because it seems to be a little more high-minded than the idiocy that made the final cut. A photo-finish with RAZE as 2014's worst film and the absolute nadir of the hipster horror movement, which is pretty much that last thing I have to say about V/H/S: VIRAL. You win, fanboys. I'm out. (R, 81 mins)

BAD TURN WORSE
(US - 2014)

An intermittently interesting Texas noir, BAD TURN WORSE has moments where it looks like it'll be another twisty BLUE RUIN, but it doesn't know when to shut up and can't avoid belaboring its points. For example, when you've got a main character handing a copy of Jim Thompson's South of Heaven to another character and telling them "You've gotta read this!" at the five-minute mark, you might be trying a little too hard. A thriller with teenage protagonists that too often feels like it was written by teenagers--which is a shame because who doesn't want to love a bleak, cynical noir written by someone named Dutch Southern?--BAD TURN WORSE works in a love triangle, a haphazardly-planned heist, money-laundering, and $20,000 belonging to a Corpus Christi gangster but still ends up with the inevitable showdown at an abandoned cotton gin where the chief villain spends an inordinate amount of time dropping snide bon mots on the hapless protagonists as he spells out his master plan instead of just dealing with the issue at hand. In a small and mostly dead Texas town, Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and his bookworm friend Sue (Mackenzie Davis)--she's the Jim Thompson superfan--can't wait to go to college, much to the disappointment of Sue's boyfriend BJ (Logan Huffman), who's bummed about losing his friends and acting out in the worst way possible. Like, stealing $20K from the safe of small-time criminal Giff (Mark Pellegrino), who runs a cotton gin owned by ruthless, big-city crime lord Big Red (William Devane). BJ blows the whole $20K on going to the city for the weekend and making it rain, showing Bobby and Sue a good time before they leave. But when they return on Monday, Giff wants to know who took the money, and to protect BJ, Bobby takes the blame. Giff wants his money back and forces the trio to steal another $20,000 from a money-laundering drop used by Big Red's guys. Needless to say, there's one double-cross after another, especially once BJ discovers that Bobby and Sue have been carrying on a clandestine fling behind his back.

Writer Southern and sibling directors Zeke & Simon Hawkins do a commendable job of establishing the downbeat atmosphere of this hellhole of a town (the film played the festival circuit a year before its eventual release, under its original title, WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE). It's the kind of place where all the businesses are boarded up, everyone works at Giff's cotton gin, and there's little business opportunities except very small-time crime (one suspects the copper wire business is booming). Even the sheriff (Jon Gries) is on Giff's payroll. Sue and Bobby are often chided by the townies for "goin' off to college," and even Bobby's mom dismisses his newfound educational aspirations with "You're not a college kid...you're a cotton kid," almost like she knows he's only going so he can be close to Sue (that's also why BJ thinks he's going). Sue is obviously too smart for BJ (and Bobby, for that matter), but unlike BJ, she never intended them to be forever. It's a depressing, dead-end town where dreams died at least a generation back, and it's the perfect setting for such a story. It's good for about 2/3 of the way, but in the final act, everything collapses as the filmmakers resort to piling on the double-crosses and have Pellegrino's Giff stop just short of donning a monocle and twirling a mustache to show how nefarious he is. Pellegrino has some great moments where he gets to spit out some memorable dialogue ("You sure like to gamble for someone with such a shit pokerface," he tells Bobby, and when he gives Bobby an ultimatum after threatening to have his goons rape Sue, he promises "I'm gonna do more to your sweet pea than hollow out her heinie-hole") but Southern has the character behave too inconsistently, careening wildly from criminal mastermind to none-too-bright doofus depending on what the story needs him to be in any given scene. Devane makes an impression with his too-brief screen time, showing up to deal with Giff and lay down the law in a bathrobe and slippers. BAD TURN WORSE is OK, but it could've easily been something a little more if the filmmakers didn't feel the need to oversell, overplot, and overexplain, like they didn't trust their audience to process the ambiguities or connect the dots. Certainly, any fan of Thompson's brand of hard-boiled pulp fiction could've made the homage-to-Thompson connection without having it stated by the characters time and again throughout. Well-intentioned and occasionally quite good, BAD TURN WORSE is more like Target Just Missed. (Unrated, 92 mins)

In Theaters: ELYSIUM (2013)

ELYSIUM
(US - 2013)

Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.  Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, William Fichtner, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Emma Tremblay, Faran Tahir.  (R, 109 mins)

South African writer/director and Peter Jackson protégé Neill Blomkamp follows his acclaimed 2009 hit DISTRICT 9 (does anyone recall that actually getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination?) with another politically-charged sci-fi epic.  ELYSIUM is definitely indicative of a Hollywood blockbuster side of Blomkamp, and the points it makes are much less subtle.  But it's still an engrossing film that shows a slightly more disciplined director (the biggest flaw of DISTRICT 9 is that he never seemed to settle on shooting documentary-style or as a straight narrative) and other than one fight scene that briefly utilizes some ill-advised PS3 camera moves, it's the kind of relentlessly-paced, hard-hitting sci-fi actioner that someone like a James Cameron or a John McTiernan would've made in the 1980s.  Like his mentor, Blomkamp is a director who knows how to use CGI so it doesn't draw attention to its artificiality.  ELYSIUM looks great, the action is non-stop, and while its metaphors are a bit simplistic and not everything in it stands up to hard science logic, it's one of the most entertaining films of the summer.

ELYSIUM opens in a 2154 Los Angeles that makes the 2019 L.A. of  BLADE RUNNER look like the good old days.  Sometime in the early 22nd century, Earth became such an overpopulated, crime-and-disease-infested shithole that the world's wealthiest people (read: the one-percenters) headed to the space station paradise of Elysium, which hovers above the planet.  The privileged of Elysium live in a safe world where there's no crime and things like cancer are easily detected and eradicated upon signs of the first trace by in-home MedPods.  Elysium is off limits to the people of Earth, essentially populated by one massive underclass who live in shantytowns and bombed-out buildings.  Any attempts by refugees to enter Elysium's atmosphere--usually to get to a MedPod to cure a terminal illness--result in immediate apprehension and return to Earth.  That is, until one day when intolerant Elysium defense secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) decides to make an example of three ships trying to get to Elysium by having them blown up with drone missiles activated by her psychotic Los Angeles-based Elysium sleeper agent Kruger (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley), which gets her on the shit list of Elysium's President Patel (Faran Tahir).  Meanwhile, in L.A., ex-con Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is trying to live a normal life, working on the assembly line at the Elysium-owned Armadyne factory, which manufactures robot security drones to keep order on Earth.  Due to a bullying manager and workplace negligence, Max is exposed to a massive dose of radiation while on the job, and a robot medical tech gives him some painkillers to stay somewhat functional and informs him "You will be dead in five days.  Thank you for your service."

Knowing he can be cured if he can get to Elysium, Max teams up with old crime cohort Julio (Diego Luna) to pull off a job for powerful, fast-talking smuggler/hacker Spider (Wagner Moura).  A gravely-ill Max is fitted with a surgically implanted neurological exoskeleton, wired into his spine and head, which gives him strength and allows him to receive data directly into his brain.  Spider wants Max to retrieve data from Armadyne boss Carlyle (William Fichtner), who possesses a "reboot" code for Elysium that Delacourt wants to use to stage a coup against the sympathetic Patel and run Elysium her own way.  Spider has his reasons for wanting the reboot code, and Max just wants to get to Elysium to cure the cancer rapidly growing inside of him, and both have to deal with an enraged Kruger, who just wants everyone dead.

As you can see, you've got your unsympathetic, selfish one-percenters, the war-mongering defense secretary, critiques of workplace abuse and lack of access to quality health care, and a revolt of the disenfranchised.  Blomkamp's politics are pretty obvious (if, for instance, you think Delacourt is the hero, you might not be Blomkamp's target audience), but he never lets things get too polemical once the action kicks in.  DISTRICT 9 immediately elevated Blomkamp to the big leagues, and he delivers with impressive set pieces, masterful handling of visual effects, and managing a much bigger cast of established actors compared to his previous effort, and it's nice that he brought his pal Copley along with him.  Damon is in fine BOURNE mode once things get serious, and Copley and ELITE SQUAD's Moura (a huge star in his native Brazil) really have some fun chewing the scenery.  Only Foster seems uneasy, due mostly to her performance being re-looped in post-production.  It's her voice, but apparently test audiences didn't like the accent she was using.  Despite her above-the-title billing, Foster doesn't have a lot of screen time, and it's glaringly obvious in some of her close-ups that she's revoicing herself because there's several bits where the words are out of sync with her lip movements.  Maybe there was a script change that necessitated changing some of her dialogue, but it's very uncommon for dubbing in a big-budget American movie to be that sloppy (this was also the case with Svetlana Khodchenkova's performance as Viper in THE WOLVERINE), especially when it involves someone of Foster's stature.  She certainly looks the part, but she just doesn't seem comfortable in the role.  Maybe it's that she probably didn't get to work with most of the major stars except for one brief scene with Copley and Alice Braga--Damon and Foster have no scenes together, and their characters never meet.  It's ultimately a minor quibble about an otherwise fine film--with its release date delayed multiple times by Sony after being shot two years ago--from someone who's all but guaranteed to become a major genre leader in years to come.

On DVD/Blu-ray: ERASED (2013) and WRONG (2013)

ERASED
(Belgium/Canada - 2012; 2013 US release)

Another entry in the post-TAKEN sweepstakes, the by-the-numbers ERASED allows Aaron Eckhart to channel his inner Liam Neeson as Ben Logan, an ex-CIA agent living in Antwerp where he's working as a consultant for a high-tech security firm.  He's recently been joined by his estranged teenage daughter Amy (Liana Liberato) after the death of his ex-wife back in the States, and while they're taking baby steps, they aren't exactly getting along.  Father and daughter set aside their differences quickly when they make an evening stop at Ben's office to find it completely empty, his e-mail account and phone records wiped, and the company headquarters in Brussels having no record of employment for him or his MIA co-workers.  It would seem he's been...wait for it....hold on...you guessed it...ERASED!

What follows is a convoluted conspiracy involving a nefarious corporation hiring a none-too-wise Ben to inadvertently assist in a plot to arm a rebel faction in Mozambique in exchange for access to a lithium mine.  But it allows Eckhart a chance to kick ass and shoot bad guys throughout Belgium, as he's pursued by an ex-lover and CIA black-ops colleague played by Olga Kurylenko, who's introduced dropping two Alka-Seltzers into a glass of water and chugging it so we know she's hard, driven, and on-the-clock 24/7.  And, SPOILER ALERT, the first thing out of Amy's mouth when she realizes her father was once a government-contracted killer is "I don't even know who you are!"  Feeling like the kind of cable-ready international programmer that should've debuted on Reelz, ERASED makes nice use of Antwerp and Brussels scenery and shows that Eckhart can be a formidable action guy, but this material is pretty second-rate, Arash Amel's predictable script is riddled with clichés, and NORTH FACE director Philipp Stolzl, a music video vet who's worked with artists like Madonna, Garbage, and Rammstein, really lets the pace lag at times.  There is one unexpected noteworthy bit where Ben's car tumbles from an on-ramp and down to the highway below after a chase sequence, and you can tell they really let the car roll off because it looks as clumsy and awkward as something like that would look in real life.  Sure, Eckhart is a much better actor than, say, Steven Seagal, but for the most part, there's nothing to differentiate the instantly-forgettable and aptly-titled ERASED from any of the countless other DTV black-ops conspiracy thrillers you've seen hundreds of times before, probably why it only managed to get a US release on just 51 screens.  (R, 105 mins)


WRONG
(France - 2012; 2013 US release)

WRONG is the latest film from French writer/director/musician Quentin Dupieux, who gave us RUBBER, arguably cinema's greatest "killer tire on a rampage" movie.  WRONG is similar in its oddball nature with its Franz Kafka-meets-Michel Gondry-and-Charlie Kaufman sense of absurdist, nightmare whimsy as it follows affable Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick) on a quest to find his missing dog, Paul.  WRONG opens with a firefighter taking a dump in the middle of the street and quickly gives us Dolph dealing with oddball neighbors; a clock that goes from 7:59 to 7:60;  an organic pizza joint with a clingy cashier (Alexis Dziena) who loves Dolph but gets him confused with his gardener Victor (Eric Judor) and gets pregnant, going from conception to labor in one day; a blank, empty, stamped envelope that arrives in Dolph's mailbox; Dolph going to his job every day in an office where there's a constant torrential downpour, even though he got fired three months earlier; a belligerent cop (Mark Burnham) who's far too eager to speak his mind; and a wealthy mystery man named Master Chang (William Fichtner) who knows the whereabouts of Paul.  There's also a private eye (Steve Little) searching for the dog, using a new technology that involves recording onto cassette the subconscious memories of canine bowel movements, which of course gives us the line "I was able to access the turd's memories."  Like RUBBER, WRONG is a prefab cult movie that's amusing for awhile until it stops being amusing and just becomes tedious and overly impressed with its own eccentricity. (Unrated, 93 mins)

In (Empty) Theaters: PHANTOM (2013)

PHANTOM
(US - 2013)

Written and directed by Todd Robinson.  Cast: Ed Harris, David Duchovny, William Fichtner, Lance Henriksen, Johnathon Schaech, Jason Beghe, Sean Patrick Flanery, Kip Pardue, Julian Adams, Jason Gray-Stanford, Matt Bushell, Dagmara Dominczyk.  (R, 99 mins)

About two months ago, I saw a poster for the nautical thriller PHANTOM at the theater.  Having heard nothing about the film prior to this, and noticing it was from a company (RCR Media Group) whose name I was seeing for the first time, my first thought, even with solid actors like Ed Harris and David Duchovny, was "No way this is opening in theaters."  Imagine my surprise when I got online and saw that PHANTOM was set to open on 2000 screens nationwide on March 1.  2000 screens?  How? Either this was going to be an OOGIELOVES-level box-office disaster or this mysterious RCR Media Group was one of these grass-roots Christian organizations that busses megachurch congregations to the theater and somehow Harris and Duchovny got roped into a religious submarine movie.  But it had an R rating.  What the hell was going on here?  What kind of tax loopholes do movie distributors of today have access to where production companies frequently spend anywhere from $20 million to $40 million on a movie that grosses $30,000 domestically and yet somehow still end up making money?  There's probably a great expose to be written about this (and the great German co-production tax incentive scam of a decade ago) by someone with more insider knowledge than me, but that's another story for another time.

Several days prior to March 1, the 2000 screens got bumped down to 1118, but RCR Media Group's debut feature as a theatrical distribution outfit (after years of producing DTV titles like HOSTEL III that were distributed by others) was still set to go.  And the box office take was as apocalyptically ugly as expected:  allegedly budgeted at $20 million (I don't believe that figure at all), PHANTOM grossed just $500,000, landing in 24th place and currently ranked as the seventh-worst all-time opening weekend for a wide release on more than 1000 screens.  Who knows what RCR was thinking or if this is their first and last theatrical release?  Regardless of how good or bad it was, PHANTOM was doomed to be a victim of bad marketing and limited commercial appeal (they weren't kidding around with the "You'll never see it coming" tag line).  But guess what?  It's actually a pretty good little B-movie that will probably find a much bigger audience when it inevitably turns up on Netflix Instant three months from now.  Maybe it should've debuted there in the first place.

In 2013, PHANTOM would've been a tough sell for anyone:  a Cold War submarine thriller set in 1968, centering on a crew of Soviet Naval officers played by American and Canadian actors sans affected Yakov Smirnoff accents.  This was a fairly common practice back in the old days of Hollywood (have you ever heard anyone complain about Kirk Douglas and Ralph Meeker playing French military officers in Stanley Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY?), but tends to not go over as well in the era of internet trolling and the inevitable WROST MVOIE EVER!!!111 IMDb commenters (remember all the pre-release bitching about Tom Cruise and a British supporting cast playing Germans in VALKYRIE?).  Older movies seem to get a pass for this sort of thing, and PHANTOM's story is compelling enough that you get invested in the characters and the drama and the lack of cartoonish Boris & Natasha accents is quickly forgotten.  A speculative story inspired by a 1968 incident involving a Soviet K-129 sub, PHANTOM follows aging, weary, booze-soaked Capt. Demi Zubov (Harris), who's being forced into retirement by his reluctant, emphysema-stricken commander Markov (Lance Henriksen).  But Markov first wants Zubov and his crew, headed by second-in-command Koslov (William Fichtner) to take a decrepit, old-school diesel sub out for one last mission before the Soviet military sells it to the Chinese.  Zubov's crew is joined by a few replacement officers and Bruni (Duchovny), a mysterious government projects official who's tagging along to test some prototype equipment, but soon reveals his true intentions.  A Spetsnaz commando working for a rogue faction of the KGB, Bruni and his men--surprise...the replacement officers!--are testing a top-secret cloaking device known as the Phantom, which imitates the signal and appearance of other vessels.  Bruni's plan is to launch a nuclear missile and trick a US sub into thinking it's the work of the Chinese, with the rationale being "Our two enemies can destroy each other while we sit back and watch."  Bruni seizes control of the sub from Zubov, who's haunted by both the legacy of his legendary Naval hero father and a tragic accident that happened under his command years earlier--that the Soviet military buried so as not to shame the Zubov name--and left him prone to epileptic seizures.  Zubov, who has no interest in going down in Soviet history as the man who started WWIII, rallies his crew to regain control from Bruni.

Writer-director Todd Robinson (the little-seen LONELY HEARTS) does a terrific job of conveying the tight, suffocating sense of claustrophobia in the close quarters of the ancient, rickety sub, and for about an hour, the fast-paced PHANTOM is a surprisingly effective, genuinely suspenseful nailbiter.  While the film plays like an old-fashioned Cold War drama, it starts to unravel in the last 30 minutes or so when Robinson starts making concessions to modern audiences.  When PHANTOM stays in the close confines of the sub, it works very well.  It's when it goes outside the sub with exploding torpedoes and the like that it collapses.  The CGI explosions are total amateur night and their utterly laughable, cartoonish execution takes you right out of the film.  In addition, the miniatures used in the underwater exteriors are pretty shoddy-looking, and it's in these scenes that PHANTOM starts to resemble a low-budget, HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER ripoff that Roger Corman might've had cranked out by Concorde Pictures in 1991.  Robinson also lets his script really stumble in the last third as well, with the conveniently-timed revelation that one of Zubov's crew (Sean Patrick Flanery) suffers from claustrophobia despite being a veteran of numerous missions with Zubov and it never being mentioned before.  Robinson's decision to turn the last sequence into something straight out of FIELD OF DREAMS by way of M. Night Shyamalan also does the film a huge disservice.  But despite those faults, the film gets enough right in its top-notch first hour to still warrant a recommendation.  Harris is outstanding as the tortured Zubov, Fichtner does an excellent job as the conflicted Koslov, torn between his loyalty to his longtime captain and friend Zubov and his own military ambitions, and Duchovny mostly hangs back, never raising his voice or taking the easy route of being an evil bad guy, instead doing a lot of subtle acting with his eyes and very quietly conveying a sense of increasing menace as the film proceeds.  PHANTOM isn't a submarine classic along the lines of DAS BOOT, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, CRIMSON TIDE, or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP, but even with its third-act stumbling and bumbling, it's a diverting, suspenseful, well-acted thriller that doesn't deserve its lowly status among the biggest box-office bombs of all time.