The movie comes to Netflix courtesy of Swedish director Adam Berg, in his feature film debut after a career in commercials and music videos. Noomi Rapace, of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Prometheus fame, takes the starring role as a mother turned soldier desperately seeking her missing daughter. Rescuing or reuniting with a missing child is a time-honored motivation for a lead character, but Black Crab takes the idea to an almost comical extreme.
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Black Crab doesn’t feel the need to explain much, there’s no good or bad side in the war. The side the audience isn’t following is obliquely referred to as “the enemy”, and the details of who did which war crimes are absent. It’s mostly focused on the immediate human drama of its six main characters, but it does bring up the war with such frequency that the lack of detail becomes annoying. Rapace and her new team are summoned under unclear circumstances and told that they’ll be ice skating an absurd distance, in the dark, behind enemy lines. They are given a package to deliver, but not told what’s in it. It’s hard to imagine what level of preparedness one might need to commit to that assignment, but six or seven minutes probably doesn’t cut it.
There’s not anything particularly great about Black Crab, but there are a few good points. The performances are all serviceable, so long as viewers are okay with a foreign language. The film is originally in Swedish, but an English dub is available. The mouth movements rarely match up, and there’s the occasional weird delivery, but it’s up to each viewer whether that outweighs having to read subtitles. The music is pretty good, it’s a dark electronic soundtrack that compliments the grim tone. The action scenes, though few and far between, are well-choreographed and tense. Tracer rounds fly through the night, stuff blows up with charming regularity, the geography is always clear. The shootouts aren’t mind-blowing, but they are solid enough for the realistic tone. It’s not going to be a John Wick movie, but there are still better action scenes in more grounded films.
One of the biggest weak points of the film is its main characters. It’s not a problem of performance, it’s very much the writing and the pacing. The six soldiers on the Black Crab mission fail to stand out. Each has a maximum of one character trait; such as having a girlfriend, obsessing over rank, enjoying antiques, or having a daughter. As the journey goes on, members of the team die, but it’s hard to miss them. A couple of them drop so quickly or say so little that viewers will likely forget they were there by the grand climax. Almost every character feels pulled from a different and often better film, and unfortunately, so does almost every major scene. There is a big twist in this film, and spoilers follow for that element. Worry not, however, most savvy viewers will be able to guess shortly after the necessary MacGuffin is introduced.
The big reveal of Black Crab is that the eponymous operation tasks a small military unit with ice skating for miles to deliver a deadly bioweapon to fellow soldiers. That particular bomb doesn’t drop until midway through the second act, and once it does, it feels like it’s changed everything. Every character knows and agrees that delivering the payload means millions of deaths, on the enemy and home teams. One of the soldiers kills himself to avoid participating in the end of the world. Most just debate the moral calculus of the action, while sticking around before their almost inevitable death.
The main character soldiers on and unquestioningly sacrifices herself and her cohorts to deliver the plague. Not out of an unstoppable patriotic desire to win the war, not because she’s unwaveringly committed to her orders, but because she’s been promised that she can see her daughter. Only when seeing her daughter is no longer on the table does she even consider the possibility that releasing a deadly virus on everyone might be a bad choice.
Every character has a few stupid decisions to their name, but the bigger problem is that they aren’t likable. Bad enough that the main character is pursuing the death of all things for selfish reasons, but she spends her first action scene gunning down the poor and desperate. The few decent moments in Black Crab don’t outweigh its complete lack of originality and charm. It’s a deeply middling film, made more unpleasant by its resemblance to some current news footage. Forgettable and dull, give it a pass.
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