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Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

"Gray Lady Down" is a poor film. A fine cast of character actors are being wasted with mediocre material. Charlton Heston was slightly past his best in terms of box office appeal but his fans might enjoy this film. Look out for a young pre-Superman Christopher Reeve in a small role. "Gray Lady Down" was one of his first films. We have been here before, regarding the plot. There are no fresh twists or surprises of any kind. Forgettable fare.

For a movie with Charlton Heston, it is unusual bad. The camera work is an imposition. Many of the "underwater" scenes (like the falling rocks) are actually made ashore and you can see that way to obvious. Special effects are cheap. The plot is unreliable. Whenever the "DSRV" connected to the submarine and they opened the hatch, there wasn't even one drop of water coming down. The story is unnecessarily stretched to the point it hurts. At least in the last half hour it gets a bit better. The overall acting sways between weak and average. It's the first movie I had to give a bad rating and it was a disappointment.I normally enjoy movies with Charlton Heston. In this one it was really hard to just sit about one and a half hours and watch it till the end. But you can't judge a movie when you haven't seen it all.My suggestion is: skip this one.

Watching this rescue-of-a-sinking-sub film back in the day, it must have felt kind of redundant in the wake of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) and AIRPORT’ 77 (1977); that said, it didn’t hinder movie mogul Lew Grade from financing a production not long after depicting the biggest (fictional) rescue operation of all time with RAISE THE TITANIC (1980) – which, incidentally, is a title I haven’t watched in some time! In any case, GRAY LADY DOWN is as much a drama detailing the plight of the sub’s constantly diminishing crew, commandeered by the oh-so-stoic Charlton Heston, as a showcase for novel sea exploration/rescue techniques (in the form of a mini-sub armed with sonar and camera designed and maneuvered by David Carradine). The tension arises out of the fact that the damaged vessel is slipping ever downwards due to the water level inside and the unstable surface where it’s been lodged; added to this, however, is antagonism going on both above and below the surface (between Carradine and Stacy Keach, the officer in charge of the rescue operation, and between Heston and Ronny Cox, the man who was supposed to relieve him of duty, respectively). Also in the cast is Ned Beatty as Carradine’s long-suffering chubby pal and Christopher Reeve (in his film debut) as Keach’s young aide; interestingly, the two would be re-united soon after for SUPERMAN (1978)! The film is aided by nice Widescreen photography and a serviceable score by Jerry Fielding, but let down somewhat by overlength (the repetitive and draggy nature of events tending towards a general dullness). However, as I said in reviews of some of the other disaster movies I’ve been watching of late, while most of these were pretty much dismissed when originally released, with time, have achieved an undeniable campy charm (amusingly, at one point the submerged crew choose to watch JAWS [1975] – conveniently, also a Universal production – as a means of respite from their current dilemma, but especially when Heston proclaims in desperation: “I feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest!”).

2/5 STARS -Eagle-eyed disaster enthusiasts should heed the warning suggested by the box copy: `made with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, with many sequences filmed aboard the U.S.S. Cayuga and Pigeon.' Despite a strong cast and a fairly exciting premise, Grady Lady Down plays like a waterlogged Naval documentary.The submarine U.S.S. Neptune has been struck and sunk by a Norwegian freighter, and has now settled on a tenuous outcropping only feet from a two mile precipice. A hastily assembled rescue team must get a DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vehicle) into position to rescue the remaining survivors before either the sub is thrust into the depths by a seaquake, is crushed by enormous water pressure, is flooded by steadily leaking watertight doors, or simply runs out of oxygen.Gray Lady Down starts out with a bang (the initial collision occurs in the first fifteen minutes of the movie). Yet it rapidly becomes bogged down in the military maneuvers and sterile technicalities of the underwater rescue mission.Charlton Heston, captain of the U.S.S. Neptune, sloshes his way through the cliché-ridden script, but he pulls-off the grizzled sailor bit and treads water nonetheless. One must wonder why he accepted the part at all, though I assume that the script did not suggest just how dreary the effects would eventually become. Stacy Keach is the demanding rescue commander who contemplates his appropriate future as a B-grade television star from the comfortably dry confines of his ship. David Carradine is the quiet and contemplative designer of the experimental sub which proves critical to the mission's success, and Ned Beatty literally rounds out the cast as his overeager assistant.So little character development is required by the script that we almost don't notice that motivation is generally missing. But then Carradine's character suddenly makes a significant sacrifice, apparently motivated by nothing other than his quiet on-screen demeanor, and we realize that we've been cheated. Only Heston manages to infuse his character with a hint of emotional growth, although much of that might have been the dark circles under his eyes which grew larger as the movie progressed.The external special effects are somewhat uneven. The underwater effects get better and better as the tension builds, and the sub scenes near the climax are resolutely convincing. But the director blew his budget on the money shots, and we are left with a variety of somewhat less important but much more confusing images elsewhere, such as the opening shadows that only hazily suggest the catastrophic collision.Based on the book Incident 1000, Gray Lady Down does indeed feel like the stilted conversion of a paperback thriller. Relentlessly long underwater maneuvering sequences probably began as exciting lines on the printed page. But watching David Carradine sweat in a cramped submarine through four separate rescue dives to 1450 feet couldn't be less interesting.The biggest problem is that some of the best effects are also the most boring, such as that of a robotic arm placing a `shape charge' into the carefully selected nook of an undersea boulder. Although the swirling waters of the ocean are well-represented, the sight of the arm selecting just the right spot, for minute after endless minute, begs the question: who cares?Special effects inside the doomed sub are few and far between, but first rate. Of course, it's pretty difficult to screw up spray from an off-camera fire hose, but `Beyond the Poseidon Adventure' proves that it can be done.Gray Lady Down is good for a single viewing, if just for the special effects and Heston's routine performance. War-hero wannabes will be delighted, disaster buffs will be mildly entertained, and everyone else will be bored to tears. Gray Lady Down's compelling premise is ultimately sunk by two dimensional characters that never transcend a lifeless script, culled from the pages of a dime store thriller.*** Celebrity spotlight: keep your eyes open for a pre-Superman Christopher Reeves aboard the bridge with Stacy Keach.