SUMMER'S TIDE ROLLS IN

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Russians are back! the Russians are back! writers of international thrillers, on page or screen, must have whooped for joy when Vladimir Zhirinovsky began spouting his virulent nationalism. What if this character got his finger on the nuclear button? Why, there'd be a right-wing update of the old red menace. So here, lighting a flame under Cold War II, is Crimson Tide, a burly, chatty melodrama about the imminence of annihilation. On a U.S. nuclear submarine, only two men-grizzled old Captain Ramsey (Gene Hackman) and his starchy second-in-command, Lieut. Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington)-have the power to trigger the apocalypse or, just maybe, prevent it.

Prevent war? Forget that! This is an action movie, isn't it? And as Clausewitz might have said, action movies are a continuation of war by other means. The genre demands that stuff blow up real good. But the most physical Crimson Tide gets is when the villain punches the hero in the face, twice-without getting punched back. And in a bizarre climax, the good guy and the bad guy sit down and talk for three minutes while waiting for somebody else to tell them what to do.

We soon learn that the Russian sub plot is a red herring. The real cold war is being waged between these two American officers. The real explosive device is inside Captain Ramsey's wayward head. And the film's real theme is executive stress. It's a charged debate among middle-management types agonizing over fuzzily transmitted orders from their boss, who happens to be the President of the U.S.

As devised by writers Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick (with a script polish by Quentin Tarantino), Crimson Tide is an old-fashioned mutiny movie -- on the U.S.S. Alabama instead of the Bounty or the Caine. Actually, this is a three-mutiny movie: commanders change faster than Italian Prime Ministers. This king-of-the-hill game gives Hackman, Washington and their cohort the chance to run around the submarine with guns and scowls. The milling is underscored with a heavy bass line that will leave moviegoers' bottoms tingling; and it is shot with lots of close-ups of manly jawlines, as if every sailor were posing to be sculpted like the U.S. Presidents onto Mount Rushmore. When in doubt, director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) lets loose a spray of water, sparks and sweat-the signature flourish of this Helmut Newton of movie machismo.

Washington does nicely playing the company man as '90s hero, an African American who has learned when to speak up and when to shut up in the white world. Perhaps the actor has learned too well; he simmers handsomely but rarely displays the informed rage he showed in A Soldier's Story and Glory. In his box-office hits (Philadelphia, The Pelican Brief), Washington cedes the fiercer emotions to his co-stars. No surprise, then, that Hackman, as a sociopath, gets all the high notes and good lines ("We're here to preserve democracy, not practice it"). If the performance consists largely of Hackman briskly massaging his scalp every few minutes, that's his way of suggesting that Ramsey is trying to soothe or stir the demons inside.

Both stars give Tide a pedigree and, despite any critic's cavils, a safe shot at being the year's first big hit. Not a Red October: a Crimson summer. --R.C.