Greyhound (2020)

Tom Hanks did double duty on 'Greyhound', a film he both stars in and wrote the screenplay for, adapting the 1955 novel 'The Good Shepard' by C. S. Forester, who is perhaps best known for 'The African Queen'. This movie is no 'African Queen' however, it is dull and gray, lacks for interesting characters, and is such a slow build that it hardly evoked an emotion in me until rather late in the picture. 

The story of a military troop and supply convey making the dangerous trans Atlantic crossing early in 1942, on a technical level the film is excellent. This movies feels quite real and even unusually accurate, and I get that it is going for a semi documentary approach, we see characters doing their jobs, but we don't learn much about them. The exception to that rule is Hanks's Commander Ernest Krause, who is a quite, religious man, self sacrificing, fair, the embodiment of what we take that generation who fought the War to be. He is admirable, but never very interesting as a protagonist.

I apricate that the film was setting out to tell a fairly simple story, it was not trying to be a kind of 'definitive work on the subject' or out spectacle all that came before it. So while a modest film in many ways I think it would have much more impact on a big screen. However 'Greyhound' was another victim of 2020, scheduled for theatrical release I think in the summer, instead its available on Appel TV, arguably their first big cinematic get. The movie left me a little cold and a fair bit bored, a disappointment to me, but not to most based on a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. From me however it gets just **