Once all this starts coming together, Hunter Killer is absorbing, even if Marsh and his screenwriters never pretend to be half as interested in their characters as they are in the submarines.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 31, 2018

It's nice to spend a couple of hours in a fictional world where we don't have to worry about the American president doing something ruinously idiotic and evil. It plays like a nostalgic fairy tale.

| Oct 29, 2018

[You'll] find more enjoyment watching a plastic yellow submarine sink to the bottom of a bathtub than watching this film.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 28, 2018

Splitting the difference between scenes of Navy SEAL rescue attempts, underwater evasive maneuvers and your own countdown clock toward an incipient nap, Hunter Killer feels both generic and underheated.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 26, 2018

All the actors are sunk by playing caricatures prone to spitting out leaden, often unintentionally humorous dialogue.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

Butler's performance-or lack thereof-keeps Hunter Killer from breaking any ground in the field of war movies.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

The Tom Clancy-Lite plot is disposable and dated... and the action, when it does arrive, is quiet enough to send the most insomnia-plagued of audiences to sleep.

| Oct 26, 2018

It's less a submarine picture and more a noisy, oddly structured mashup of Russian military coup, Navy SEALs rescue operation and Gerard Butler's ability to clench his jaw three clicks past the setting "fully clenched."

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

An overlong, very silly movie that's still sort of watchable, with Butler as its unlikely center of gravity.

| Original Score: C | Oct 26, 2018

The film's second half kicks into gear and plays out like a moderately efficient popcorn thrill ride, even if it's not on the level of sub thrillers like "Crimson Tide" or "The Hunt for Red October."

| Original Score: B- | Oct 26, 2018

There's some impressive action and a storyline that, let's face it, is no more outlandish than current headlines and much more satisfying.

| Original Score: B | Oct 26, 2018

Storytelling is both serviceable and refreshingly non-reliant on the chaotic cutting that distinguishes so much contemporary action fare.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 26, 2018

You know those DVDs that sit in a giant Wal-Mart bin? The kinds of movies usually dumped unceremoniously into theaters in January, and maybe if you're going stir-crazy you take a chance and find yourself happily surprised? Hunter Killer is one of those.

| Oct 26, 2018

It is bombastic and garish, ridden with clichés, preposterous politics and diplomacy, and frenetic, video game energy. And it so often so unintentionally silly that it's actually kind of a fun watch.

| Oct 26, 2018

While 'Hunter Killer" bounces between serious and silly, it never quite finds a suitable place to land.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 26, 2018

The plot has a lot of moving parts, but Marsh fits them together adroitly to deliver a thriller that's consistently exciting and thoroughly preposterous.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 25, 2018

The film is largely uncontroversial, save for a climax that could double as an advertisement for the Navy and America itself.

| Oct 25, 2018

However nutty its geopolitics, "Hunter Killer" does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.

| Oct 25, 2018

Generic big-screen genre-fiction. Cliched but watchable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 25, 2018

The movie is overlong, at times confusing, and it's self-important, with a soundtrack that keeps telling us we feel things that we don't. Still, if you like this kind of movie, it's not a bad use of two hours...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2018