‘Greyhound’ is The Lean, Mean Streaming Content Dads Crave

Tom Hanks’s latest, Greyhound, is pretty much the ultimate Dad Movie. It features America’s Dad, Tom Hanks, in a role perfectly suited to appeal to America’s other dads: he’s the captain of a Fletcher-class Destroyer during the Battle of the Atlantic, safeguarding supplies en route to aid in the fight against the Nazis. He says his grace (before meals he has no time to eat) and a prayer or two; he asks for slippers at one point, the better to go to war in.

Oh, and one more thing: he’s the lead in a blessedly short movie.

Officially 91 minutes but closer to mid-’80s sans credits, Greyhound —an Apple TV+ exclusive— is a lean, mean, streaming machine, the sort of movie that doesn’t fuss around with things like “backstory” or “emotional entanglements for supporting characters.” Frankly, Hanks, who wrote, and director Aaron Schneider, could’ve gotten it closer to a tight 80 minutes by ditching the scenes with Evelyn (Elisabeth Shue), whose rejection of Captain Krause’s (Hanks) proposal of marriage opens the movie and gives him something to strive to return home to.

No, no: this is not a movie that is worried about love lost or abandoned or postponed, yet another casualty of war. Greyhound is a movie that cares about rudders and knots and torpedoes, one that cares about flares warning of U-Boat attacks and the difficulty of disposing of bodies at sea after they’ve been mutilated by torpedoes. Tastefully, of course: we never really see the bodies. The horrors of war are largely avoided except in the most general sense — Krause chastens one of his sailors for celebrating the death of 50 “Krauts”; those were still men with souls, after all, even if those souls were encased in lederhosen — and the mission’s justness never really comes into question.

Greyhound is, very simply, a movie about men at war and the tactics they use to win the battles that make up that war. Where ships should turn and at what speed. Deceptions by the enemy and how they must be countered. The difficulty of steering tonnage at speed on water. That sort of thing.

And in that simplicity is its effectiveness — indeed, its power. Hanks’s grimaces capture a range of emotion one might think impossible from mere furrowings of brows. An ill-timed sneeze at one point becomes a matter of life and death. Sure, the CGI oceans occasionally look like they’re ripped from really nice cut scenes out of high-caliber video games. Yeah, the pitching of decks is sometimes a bit too obviously done in front of green screens. But we move from scene to scene and torpedo to torpedo with such alacrity that we never think about it too much.

Those looking for something a bit more intense and interested in the emotional toll war can take on the individual — while still getting a large dose of battlefield tactics — would be better off taking in a picture like David Ayer’s Fury. Starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a tank crew storming through Germany as World War II comes to a close, Fury is a far more relaxed 135 minutes, taking its time to introduce us to each member of the tank christened Fury. The battles weave together with the story of this crew, newcomer Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) serving as the audience surrogate as we learn just what it’s like to serve in a cannon and machine gun nest on treads while facing down superior German technology and an increasingly desperate enemy.

Fury is probably a better piece of storytelling, in a traditional sense: we learn about the men of the tank and through their travails, hopefully in turn learning something about ourselves and the human spirit. But Greyhound is, strangely, a more visceral experience because of how little it cares for the men surrounding Captain Krause. We are there, in the ship, throughout their Atlantic crossing and that’s all that matters: this mission, this passage. There’s an immediacy that keeps your attention and demands your eye.

Undoubtedly, there could have been a two-and-a-half-hour version of Greyhound, one that asks us to invest in the lives of the men below decks, asks us to care for their wives and their children and their hopes and dreams. One that dives a bit deeper into the ugliness of even transport missions such as these.

But, paradoxically, that deeper film is not the movie we Dads need at this point in the unending Coronavirus malaise. No: we need something we can consume after the kids go to bed but before we need to sleep. We need something a bit sparser and to the point, something more … focused. A movie that revels in jargon, phrases that make us feel at home even if we’ve never once stepped foot on a ship of any size.

We need Tom Hanks yelling about rudders and bearings and getting ships to safety, and we need him to do it in 85 minutes. We need Greyhound, a perfect streaming diversion.

Sonny Bunch is a contributor to the Washington Post and a cohost of the Sub-Beacon podcast.

Watch Greyhound on Apple TV+