The sinking feeling starts almost immediately during “The Silent Service.” Amazon Prime Video’s first Japanese original movie is being marketed as a production with international appeal: a punchy geopolitical thriller that’s tailor-made for the Tom Clancy crowd. But there seems to be a leak in the hull of this lumbering, weirdly unexciting film about a rogue Japanese submarine captain facing off against the U.S. Navy.
Clancy’s “The Hunt for the Red October” was presumably an inspiration for the movie’s source material, a manga series by Kaiji Kawaguchi that caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1988. Stretching to 32 volumes, “The Silent Service” was always going to be tricky to adapt for the big screen. Kohei Yoshino’s film (from a script by Hikaru Takai) brings the story up to date, but barely even tries to make it work as a standalone feature, playing more like a pilot episode for a TV series.
There’s certainly enough here for a multi-episode drama: political intrigue, an enormous cast of characters and a narrative that’s constantly zipping between submarines and situation rooms. At the center of it all is Capt. Shiro Kaieda (Takao Osawa), who fakes his own death — along with the rest of his crew — to take command of a nuclear submarine that has been developed in secret by Japan and the United States.
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