In Disney's 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid, Sebastian the crab performs a Calypso-style song to extol the simple pleasures of life beneath the waves.

"We in luck here, down in the muck here, under the sea," croons the chirpy crustacean.

Alas, his underwater love doesn't extend to the submarine crew of Kevin Macdonald's thriller, who find themselves at each other's throats during a potentially lucrative salvage operation in international waters.

From the moment one of the salty seadogs is described by comrades as a psychopath, there's little doubt in our minds that copious blood will be spilt in the claustrophobic confines of a vintage Russian diesel tin can.

It's hard to muster sympathy for the crew mates when they have knowingly invited an unhinged killing machine into a confined space with nowhere to hide.

Similarly, when another man starts wheezing and spluttering with a death rattle cough before the expedition has even begun, we start counting the minutes until the first burial at sea.

Working class ex-Navy Captain Robinson (Jude Law) is laid off after 11 years of loyal service to a salvage company.

He sacrificed his marriage for the job, so redundancy is a bitter pill to swallow.

Good friend Kurston (Daniel Ryan) has a cure for Robinson's woes: the location of a downed German U-boat, which sank during the Second World War with a cargo of gold bullion worth 80 million Reichsmarks.

Buoyed by funding from a mysterious benefactor named Lewis (Tobias Menzies), Robinson recruits top diver Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn), old hands Reynolds (Michael Smiley) and Peters (David Threlfall), plus new boy Tobin (Bobby Schofield) as well as a tight-knit Russian crew comprising Blackie (Konstantin Khabenskiy), Morozov (Grigory Dobrygin), Baba (Sergey Veksler), Levchenko (Sergey Kolesnikov) and Zaytsev (Sergey Puskepalis).

Lewis' underling Daniels (Scoot McNairy) nervously joins the operation to ensure his boss' investment is safe.

"This wreck's gonna sink!" protests the lackey as he surveys Robinson's battered craft.

"Useless sub if it doesn't," retorts Peters dryly.

As the vessel descends into the murky depths, fear and paranoia take a vice-like grip, causing crew members to turn against each other.

Black Sea stacks the odds against the characters, most of whom are little more than broadly sketched archetypes.

Law's thick Scottish accent is more ship-shape than the script.

Screenwriter Dennis Kelly, creator of the hit Channel 4 series Utopia, jettisons plausibility from the torpedo tubes early on.

He ties himself in sailing knots trying to work out if he is making a scabrous attack on corporate greed and globalisation, a redemption story of fathers and sons, or a simple nerve-frayed thriller.

Thankfully, he knows how to engineer taut set-pieces inside and out of the stricken submarine and director Macdonald effectively ratchets up tension with sparing use of digital special effects.