Give U-571 Das Boot (spoiler alert, I guess, though I don't think it possible to spoil bilge)

Rating: 3/10 (2 January 2009)

Cheap visual effects (the same pipe busts the same way--and with the same piece of footage--twice. How lazy can a director get?), never the tiniest moment of suspense, and romance-novel-level dialog (Chief Harvey Keitel to raw elevated second-in-command Matthew McConaughey: "The captain is always right, even when he's wrong."), unlike, in all respects, the movie they were attempting to knock off. Keitel, after reluctantly obeying McConaughey's order to sink to a super red-zone depth of 200 meters (I don't think she can take much more, cap'n), says, gratefully (and predictably), "Those Germans really know how to build a boat." Now if only those Americans (or those French, whichever B-movie producers did it) knew how to make movies like those Germans, too, they'd have known that casting Keitel in support of McConaughey, who starts to come apart at a meter-depth of about 20, would prove to be the real disaster.