Operation Seawolf

Just watched this and I must admit Im a sucker for U Boat movies. This severely lacked in action and any form of character development. As far as realism I wanted to bang my head on the desk several times. It was obviously pretty cheaply made and the CGI wasnt too bad overall.

The acting was ok. Nothing that will leave any kind of a lasting memory but if you like Sub Movies I would say give it a watch. No way I would watch it twice .

Theres a scene where they are on the surface at night towards the end and preparing to fire on a merchant ship. They are on the bridge with Binos and then it shows them turning towards the target to line up. It shows the periscope in the water and the next scene they are on the bridge again. Just little things like that throughout.

This movie is beyond bad. Do not even waste your time watching the trailer.

I can't believe Frank Grillo agreed to make this movie. Its either he was desperate for money, or he owed someone a big favour.

Everytihng about this movie is sub-par. It's not even a C-Grade movie. Acting is woeful, sets are mediocre, and I've seen better graphics from a computer game. And the post-production editing, simply atrocious. The movie didn't have any atmosphere. Lacks any background ambience. Clearly indicating this was all filmed in a studio.

But I got to hand it to the produces, in getting this green-lit for approval. Otherwise, whom in their right mind would have funded this.

VERDICT: Avoid at all costs.

This B-Grade movie is loaded with numerous factual errors and goofs. Rank insignia wrong, wrong uniforms and boots, office and household items that post date WW2, filmed in an obvious American submarine that is supposed to be German and on it goes.

This movie was actually available on-line in full HD, to be viewed on 3rd party streaming site about a week before the official release date. I watched it there and waited until IMBD unlocked the "movie review" link after the release date officially passed.

In all honesty, my viewpoint is that any movie with Dolph Lundgren made since appearing in Rocky, is rarely watchable. He has virtually no acting ability at all in my opinion. If I see Dolph Lundgren appearing in the credits of a movie, I am more likely not to watch it, since I find almost every movie with his appearances to be nothing short of disappointing.

As far as the movie goes, the storyline is believable, even though historically inaccurate. It is correct that Germany experimented with rockets launched from submarines with the intended target to be USA, German technology failed to make such a concept operational. Just google "rocket U-boot" to read about the failed program.

There is one scene that left me cringing.... Dolf Lundgren as a Submarine Captain Hans Kessler is inspecting his crew in a building basement. He says, "these are not kriegsmarine", to which the mariners all lined up in different uniforms, and some not even in uniforms (contrary to strict German regulations), start stamping their feet singing a German naval song, which is an attempt to "carbon copy" the same sequence in WW2 classic "Battle of the Bulge" with the tankers singing Panzerlied. Apart from the naval song not being inspirational to anyone not familiar to it, some of the mariners (actors) are seen with their hands in their pockets and not even singing along, not withstanding that it was sung very badly and out of tune.

Like I said earlier, the story line is believable, but as it nears the end, the story line goes off on an unbelievable tangent.

Overall, the movie is OK to watch if you are bored, but it depicts nothing accurate, nothing historical, nothing suspenseful, bad acting, bad cinemaphotography, I consider the movie as a recommendation to watch, only if your lawn grass stops growing and there is no other more exciting action to watch.

I will not say that the movie is a piece of Krap, but it may well be a significant contributor to that pile of Krap you will see popping up on the sidewalk.

The basic plot idea does make sense and was considered in reality - so that was a very good starting point. Effects are mediocre at best for 2022, but are good enough to tell the story, and same goes for the props. The only missing thing left for a good movie was a script and some guys to check it for factual errors - and the one script they decided to realise is a desaster. Way too many banal, horrible timed speeches, no real dialog, no story progression.

Sad thing is, if they had developed a simple storyline, told through dialog and the limited amount of props and effects, this could have been a decent war movie.

I am a big fan of both submarine movies and movies about the second world war. So with this movie - which combines both - I was really looking forward to go and watch it. And with a cast including Dolph Lundgren, what could go wrong?!

Well, the issue is that this movie has several really big issues...

First of all, it is the poor visual effects (VFX) that they used in "creating" ships and planes. You can so easily see that they are fake that you continuously focus on this shortcoming. Honestly, the VFX are of such a poor level that a modern game looks more realistic during gameplay than this movie.

Second, it is the way the actors speak. From the start of the movie they tend to "germanize" the english. And it just sounds so totally fake. Why didn't they chose for a format where the actors all speak german in only the first couple of minutes of the movie, after which they switch to english?! I have seen this exact principle being used in the famous movie "The Hunt for the Red October", another submarine movie where they switched in this way from russian to english.

Third, it is the very obvious mistakes that they make. For instance, they show the so-called "Atlantic Fleet Command"-building in the USA. But you can see very clearly that the building says "Federal Reserve", meaning that it is a building from the central bank. With all efforts that are put in VFX, was it such a difficult task to remove the letters "federal reserve" from the building?! Something like that is even basic functionality in e.g. Adobe Photoshop.

Instead of wasting the production budget on expensive actors like Dolph Lundgren, it would have been way better spent towards solving the above-mentioned issues. Hiring expensive actors and neglecting the basics, seems to be some kind of recent trend. You can also see it with many - if not all - of the movies in which Bruce Willis features. There seems to be group of producers whom just prefer to spend big on actors instead of getting the basics right. And these movies do not even deserve the credit to be called "B-movie"... I think this type of movie deserves to called something like C-movie, where the "C" stands for all the Cash that is literally wasted by using expensive actors.

I should mention that the storyline of this movie is quite okay. This shows that this movie had way more potential if they had just spent the budget more wisely.

This movie clearly doesn't deserve a rating that is even close to sufficient. Such scores (5/10 and above) are meant for movies that meet all the basics. To give this movie still some credit for the storyline, I think a rating of 3/10 is what it maximally deserves. Spending any time and money on seeing this movie is just a waste...