Critic Reviews

Hunter Killer grabs the audience by the throat and speeds ahead while disbelief wallows helplessly in its bubbly wake.

Won’t win any awards for acting or writing but generates suspense when it needs to and tells an engrossing Tall Tale.

Much of the film’s success is due to the work of a better-than-average ensemble.

A surprisingly fun throwback to Cold War thrillers.

Despite the good stuff, though, Hunter Killer doesn’t ever really justify its existence. Conceived in 2011, viewing it through any other lens than today’s political climate is impossible.

A better-than-expected entry in the all-too-often neglected sub sub-genre, with Butler showing impressive restraint.

However nutty its geopolitics, Hunter Killer does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.

Hunter Killer won’t win any awards for originality, but it may win a couple for the brazenness with which it stacks clichés upon clichés. Basically, it’s "Crimson Tide" meets "Lone Survivor" meets "Under Siege" meets a Russian variation on "Olympus Has Fallen," with a bit of "Geostorm" thrown in. At least three of those movies are pretty good, so the overall math works in the film’s favor.

Hunter Killer needs its radar calibrated, because while it bounces between serious and silly, it never quite finds a suitable place to land.

Hunter Killer seems old-fashioned. It belongs to a genre that was pretty much exhausted before the Cold War was over. And it threatens us with a world that, from the standpoint of 2018, doesn’t look all that bad. The movie is overlong, at times confusing, and it’s self-important, with a soundtrack that keeps telling us we feel things that we don’t.