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80In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.
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75Much of what's contained in Phantom is at best speculative and at worst completely made-up. But, regardless of the accuracy, it makes for compelling viewing. Phantom is one of the best films of a lousy early 2013 release roster.
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60Phantom is a relatively tight, gripping story told with efficiency that makes room for its fine roster of actors to explore old-fashioned ideas on honor and loyalty.
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Feb 26, 201360Manly, sharp-edged submarine B movies don’t come along often anymore — so consider this Cold War off-white-knuckler a welcome blast of recycled air.
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Mar 1, 201350Ed Harris in Phantom is like Steve Carlton with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1972 — delivering a wall-to-wall, amazing performance that's lost in a sea of dreadfulness.
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50Intriguing, if uneven, thriller.
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50Todd Robinson’s Phantom gives us a couple of things we haven’t seen in a while: the great Ed Harris and a Cold War submarine thriller. It’s not something you want to plunk down $12 for, but just diverting enough to check out when it arrives on Netflix Instant.
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50The combination of tight close-ups and jarring camera work might require a dose of Dramamine. Better yet, give this movie a wide berth and check out a superb film set in a submarine, the 1981 classic "Das Boot."
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Feb 28, 201350In the end, The Phantom remains mediocre, with flat cinematography and crude dialogue.
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50The crew doesn’t much look the part either, save for Schaech’s Stalin ’stache. Yet the movie does show the ability to get past this, even with the weight of all its narratively risky conspiracy theorizing. It’s a shame the intrigue has to get torpedoed by elements that mostly feel correctable.
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50Robinson is undone partly by his own workmanlike touch as a writer, and partly by matters of casting. I like Harris, and he's quite moving here, but every time Duchovny reappears the overall energy level sinks to crush depth.
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50Though pitched as a thriller, Robinson’s woefully underbudgeted film plays instead like a chamber drama, so simple and unadorned that it could just as easily be staged as an off-off-Broadway play without anyone telling the difference. And that isn’t entirely to the film’s detriment, either: With a cast choked with great character actors like Ed Harris, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, less is sometimes more.
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50To be honest, I can rarely recall any film, on any subject, that made less sense.
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50Robinson manages some suspense, but the thriller’s ticking clock is a weak one.
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42The idea of the film is certainly clever enough, it’s the execution that lacks finesse.
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40The newest model of the old submarine-from-hell picture.
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30Despite the world-changing ramifications inherent to the plot, the results are more tedious than thrilling.
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Feb 26, 201330The ensuing suspense story is a pastiche of familiar tropes—effectively paced, but without originality. And what is up with combinations of Ed Harris, water, and unbelievably hokey endings?
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30The potential for screw-tightening suspense gets lost amid the ineffectual dramatics in Phantom, a feeble fictionalization of a crucial but little-known moment when a rogue Soviet submarine brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
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25Heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.
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25Todd Robinson's film is a third-rate submarine-set drama until, in its final moments, it sinks to fourth-rate.
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0The dialogue is dreadful (though we are at least spared the usual hokey Russian accents) and the wrap-up ridiculous, the only mystery being why this peculiarity was ever greenlighted at all.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 0 out of 5
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Mixed: 3 out of 5
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Negative: 2 out of 5
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Ed Harris has a bad lead performance which is unusual for him, but more importantly its badly written and just all around stupid in every way.
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