Acceptable hollywood apology for "Midway" The first thing I thought leaving this film was that my pallet was finally cleansed of that abomination of a film "Midway". Greyhound is everything Midway wasn't. It's well paced, streamlined, uses CGI appropriately and felt mostly "real".
I don't think it's fair to lump together the greatest generation and baby boomers as the singular audience for this type of film. I think a well done war movie can be for anyone, as well proven by films like 1917 and Saving Private Ryan. That said this film can be described as stereotypical of the kind of film demographics who have experienced times of war or are war buffs would enjoy more than the average audience.
Greyhound is barely an hour and thirty minutes in length. If I recall correctly it retells the 36 hour journey of a supply convoy escort between air support deadzones of the Atlantic during WWII. The Convoy is being hunted the entire journey by a squad of german u-boats. Nearly every second of the films run time is spent engaging in battle or the greyhound dealing with the aftermath.
This is both to the films credit and somewhat a weakness. More often than not it's the interludes in war films that ruin them. Greyhounds creators have somewhat bizarrely chosen to just not have them at all. In lieu of the quiet moments, to the films credit, there's constant subtle nods to the heart break and exhaustion experienced by the captain and crew. The captain is awake for so long, he inadvertently thanks members who have died, his feet bleed from standing, an endless stream of coffee comes in and out of the picture.
You'll notice it sounds like I'm praising the film, but it does suffer a bit from feeling less solid reality at times.
This comes from two detriments, the first being that I'm sorry to say it really could have used just a pinch of drama. It didnt need to be 3 hours long or anything, but man I was thirsty of just 10 minutes of characters talking about anything other than the problematic radar or radioing the other ships. It felt like every character had "something" to say and I would have liked to hear it, even if just a bit. This instead was just shy of being one of those war re-enactments you see in documentaries.
The second, and this is a minor nitpick, but the CGI ship battles were a bit rough and obvious. I understand, this was not done on a huge budget and to be clear the CGI looked fine, just noticeable. In a perfect world I'd have liked to see more practical effects.
Easy recommendation for anyone who just wants to get absorbed in a WWII action film for a couple hours.