Greyhound is a 2020 war film directed by Aaron Schneider, with a screenplay written by Tom Hanks adapting C.S. Forester's 1955 novel The Good Shepherd. Hanks stars as Commander Ernest Krause, a first-time captain escorting an Allied convoy across the Atlantic through the stretch known as the Black Pit, with Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan and Elisabeth Shue in support. It runs 91 minutes, which Variety pointed out is barely eighty once you remove the credits.

I should declare my position before anything else. Tom Hanks is the only person I am aware of who loves the Second World War more than I do, and I intend that as a compliment to both of us. Consider the record he has assembled: Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Masters of the Air. That is not a filmography, it is a syllabus. Between acting, writing and producing, the man has done more to put that conflict on screen for a modern audience than almost anybody alive.

So my expectations were high going into Greyhound, and that is entirely on me, but it is also the honest context for my disappointment.

This film falls into the Saving Private Ryan category, in that it is a fictional narrative constructed on top of a rigorously accurate depiction of real conditions. The naval procedure is meticulous, the tactical detail is dense, and the sense of what it was actually like to run a destroyer through U-boat waters in 1942 is convincing. Hanks clearly researched this properly, and it shows in every line of jargon.

The problem is that the story on top of all that is simply not very appealing, and more importantly, there is no character carrying it.

I never found anybody to grip my seat over. Krause is very obviously intended to be that figure, and Hanks is good, because he is always good, bringing a quiet, exhausted decency to a man who does not sleep or eat for fifty consecutive hours. But we are given no time whatsoever to invest in him before the film launches into the Atlantic and starts shouting coordinates. There is almost no prelude, no establishing of who this man is beyond a brief and somewhat awkward flashback with Elisabeth Shue, who is given nothing to work with.

And I am very much not alone in this. The critical response at the time repeatedly flagged thin characterisation, with one reviewer concluding that Greyhound turns war itself into the main character. That is a generous framing of the same observation, because what it means in practice is that no human being in this film is permitted to become one.