I wasn’t going to subscribe to Apple TV+. There wasn’t really anything there I wanted to see there aside from maybe the new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound. But I certainly wasn’t going to sign up for another streaming service for one movie no matter who was in it. Just like during that brief period when I signed up for CBS All-Access when I said I wouldn’t just to watch Star Trek: Picard, I had another reason, namely Star Trek the Animated Series during that phase of my Trek watch.
But then Apple TV+ had a special offer: package Apple TV+ with CBS and Showtime, three networks that on their own I was at best only passingly interested, for about the same price as Netflix? OK, I could give that a try. And then I could see if Greyhound was any good.
Hanks stars as Commander Ernest Krause, newly promoted to captain of the USS Greyhound, a destroyer tasked with escorting and protecting a convoy of ships crossing the Atlantic during the second World War. Air support from either the United States or England can only protect the ships but so far from their respective coasts, meaning there’s a spot in the ocean called the Black Hole where the naval vessels are on their own. Ships like the Greyhound are needed to protect the convoy ships from German U-boats. Radar and sonar are still new inventions and are both inherently faulty machines. And Krause has never led a ship into combat let alone during a mission like this.
What follows is a short, tense movie, running only about 90 minutes, where Krause needs to keep one step ahead of the Germans while still keeping as many ships as he can afloat. Given his and his crew’s general inexperience with this type of warfare, it isn’t surprising that they might make some mistakes, but this is war. Mistakes of any kind will get people killed, and there’s one German sub that managed to get through to the Greyhound, enough to taunt Krause and his crew. Can Krause keep it together to get most if not all of the ships to England?
Greyhound is a perfectly fine movie for its type. It’s tense, gets right to the point, and hits all the expected notes. Focusing on how unreliable the technology is and how inexperienced the crew is, it focuses instead on harrowing scrapes punctuated by Krause’s basic humanity. He’s a man who, unlike the rest of the crew, will not celebrate sending his first U-boat to the bottom and will mourn when the mess attendant who serves his breakfast is among the handful of fatalities during one attack. Hanks, who also wrote the script, is the only really recognizable name in the cast aside from Elisabeth Shue , and her role is limited to the opening scene as Krause’s love interest back home who isn’t quite ready to take the next big step. As a movie, Greyhound isn’t going to be the next big thing in war movies, but it’s a very fine way to spend a bit of time during a pandemic.
Grade: B
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