No one is going to shoot me for saying that this is not cinema of the grand, literary order. It's an adventure movie staring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery and just about every B-list actor Hollywood had in the 80s, with a few extra A-listers like Scott Glen and James Earl Jones thrown in for fun. It's based on a Clancy novel. It's all about the cold war and submarines and men being men, damn the torpedoes! If John Wayne had been available, I'm sure he would have been cast somewhere.
WTH, I don't really care. Give me the testosterone IV and plug it in, because I love watching this film over and over. The performances are impeccable (catch Tim Curry as the nervous Soviet ship surgeon) and the sea chase scenes are chair-gripping tight. I've got a list of adventure movies a mile long that I love watching, from Wayne in Rio Bravo to Ford in Indiana Jones, but this is the movie that I return to again and again. The moral of this review? Sometimes it really is just about the popcorn.
At IMDB: The Hunt for Red October
