Black Water (2018)
Black Water is an American action thriller film directed by Pasha Patriki. It stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in their fifth collaboration, specifically the second time they appear as on-screen allies. The film was released direct-to-video in the US on May 25, 2018.
Plot.
Scott Wheeler (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a deep cover operative awakens along with another prisoner, Marco (Dolph Lundgren), to find himself imprisoned in a CIA Blacksite on board a retrofitted nuclear submarine. Enlisting the help of a rookie agent and another prisoner, he must race against the clock to escape and discover who set him up. He goes through his recent memories. Wheeler is a CIA agent looking for a leak in the CIA along with his partner Melissa Ballard (Courtney B Turk) by using a USB drive that needs two components to activate. Melissa carries the drive, while Wheeler carries the activation key. He woke up the next day being shot and while trying to escape, Melissa is killed. Wheeler manages to escape. He goes to meet his handler, but finds his handler killed. Wheeler is captured and drugged by Agent Ferris (Patrick Kilpatrick), who believes Wheeler is responsible for the deaths of his fellow CIA agents. Agent Rhodes (Al Sapienza) believes Wheeler is innocent. They take Wheeler to the submarine for interrogation, where they meet the submarine’s crew.
The submarine crew is split between those who operate the submarine, led by Captain Darrow (John Posey); the security crew, led by Kingsley (Aleksander Vayshelboym) and CIA agents Cassie Taylor (Jasmine Waltz) and Ellis Ryan (Aaron O’Connell). Wheeler then wakes up.
Wheeler is interrogated by Agent Preston and his helper and believes he was set up. Agent Rhodes interrogates Wheeler about the location of the activation key. Wheeler realises Rhodes is a traitor and Rhodes kills the rest of the CIA crew with his helper and forces the rest of the submarine’s security crew to follow his orders. Wheeler manages to escape, but is captured by Cassie and Ellis. They plan on going to the control room to contact someone topside, not knowing the submarine would have to rise to the surface or float the buoy. When they reach the control room, they are ambushed and manage to escape, but Ellis is killed in the gunfire.
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Wheeler and Taylor force the crew to make the submarine go topside by increasing the pressure of a pipe. While making their way through the submarine, Taylor is shot, but survives. Taylor learns that Rhodes recruited Wheeler into the CIA and he wants to sell the drive, which contains an algorithm on how to activate sleeper agents. They get help by freeing Marco, who is German Special Forces and is imprisoned in the submarine because he also knows what is going on, and thus can not be killed. Rhodes directs his helper to go to ‘Plan B’ whilst convincing the submarine crew to stay at their current depth by telling them Wheeler is a traitor. He allied himself with Kingsley and the rest of security. Captain Darrow is still ordered to go topside and meet an extraction team in Cuba.
Development.
Black Water was officially announced on January, 4th 2017 with Jean-Claude van Damme and Dolph Lundgren co-starring.[8] Van Damme and Lundgren first collaborated on Universal Soldier in 1992. Since then, they’ve appeared in two sequels together (Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning), as well as The Expendables 2. According to screenwriter Chad Law, Black Water “came together” when producer Richard Switzer “called me up and said he wanted to do an action movie set on a submarine. That was it really … and we took it from there.” Law and Switzer had collaborated with Lundgren in 2017 when filming the action thriller Altitude. Furthermore, Law “specifically” wrote 2012’s Six Bullets for Van Damme, after being hired by producer Brad Krevoy.