I never thought I'd see Tom Hanks starring in a feature film with the same production values as a SyFy Channel original movie, but here is Greyhound – an otherwise tight, lean, and straightforward picture.
Director Aaron Schneider and Hanks, who also wrote the script, do a good job developing suspense and urgency; for example the opening sequence wherein the crew of the Fletcher-class destroyer Greyhound patiently stalks and intercepts a German submarine before eventually blowing it up with depth charges, or when, after the hunter becomes the hunted and the American destroyer comes under heavy fire, the captain of the Greywolf – another, much more fearsome, German submarine – radios the Greyhound to taunt the crew with omens of doom; other than this disembodied voice we hear or see no Nazis, and the Greywolf, like Moby Dick, appears only until the very end, all of which adds to the sense of constant, ever-present danger.
Greyhound is best when decisions are made and orders are given on the ship’s bridge. Unfortunately the thrill of the hunt loses its impact when we peek outside and see that the Greyhound is surrounded by a completely computer-generated sea – as if it's sailing through an ocean of half-congealed grape jelly. Say what you will about Waterworld, but at least it was honest; I don't care if they used a real body of water or just dug a giant pit and filled it one bucket at a time – the point is, it was honest-to-goodness H2O.
On the other hand, Greyhound's Atlantic Ocean and everything in it – ships, submarines, explosions – achieves a level of fakery that not even Hanks's considerable gravitas can overcome. As far as I'm concerned, he's just playing a real-time strategy video game, to the point that when someone died I didn't care; I would just tell myself, “it’s okay, it was just another non-playable character.”