Reviews

You'll probably enjoy this movie if you enjoyed Mamma Mia - but if you saw the trailer and thought that it looked like an uproarious comedy - well, you've already seen the funniest parts. This movie follows the unfortunate tradition of putting its' best jokes into trying to market itself - which means that the watch is ultimately a let-down. Though marketing itself as a comedy, it ultimately plays as a musical, and the music is quite average. Husbands - if you can keep it to yourself and spring the movie on your wife as a surprise watch, she may thoroughly enjoy it - the jokes will be new. But unfortunately, the higher a profile this movie & trailer gets, the more of a disappointment it becomes. Having heard the trailer on a loop-tape for the better part of a month before seeing it, the final experience of watching it was rather arduous. If you're a video-store employee or a hard-core trailer-watcher, you're better off viewing 'Burt Wonderstone' (released the same week) - some of the funniest moments are not in the trailer, making it a pleasant surprise!

Submarine films are few and far between - which is a shame, because there are few settings which breed tension in the way that a steel coffin submerged 200m below the sea's surface can. 'Phantom' isn't groundbreaking, but if you're after tension, heroism, drama and bravery, few current new releases deliver in the way that this movie does. There are a few real tearjerker moments - and at the end of the day, the movie does what it says on the box. Submarine. Conflict. Awesome. Sure, it's not going to fetch many stars from the art-house crowd - but if you want a simple, tense actioner; that doesn't ask you to suspend belief too much - you could do much, much worse.