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I mentioned in my recent write-up on Match Point that I've been going back to watch movies again that might figure in my "new and revised" top 100 list. When I made the first list years back, one movie that just squeaked into the bottom 10 was U-571 a military action film released in 2000. If I'd placed it accurately the first time around, well then surely I'd seen 10 more worthy films that would kick it off the bottom of the list anyway.

But more to the point... really? U-571? My memory of the film had faded considerably in the decade since I'd first seen it. And it somehow just seemed impossible that a movie starring Matthew McConaughey and directed by Jonathan Mostow (the man who brought us the lame Terminator 3, and really-only-good-in-concept Surrogates) could actually have been that good. So I resolved to check it out again.

I found that surprisingly, my original assessment of it wasn't far off the mark. I mean, it's not high art, but it's a very well-made action film. Set in World War II, it tells the story of a submarine on an urgent covert mission to secure a code machine used by the Nazis. On a more personal level, it tells the story of a first officer (McConaughey) who is unexpectedly thrust into the captain's position and must learn to call the shots.

There are a lot of great action sequences in this movie. People often point to The Hunt for Red October as a great naval thriller, but I found the sub-against-sub and sub-against-destroyer sequences in this movie to be far more engaging. The tactics are more sophisticated, the pacing more taut, and the tension higher.

There's also some good acting in the movie. Besides McConaughey (who is well cast for this role), Bill Paxton plays the captain above him, and Harvey Keitel the wise CPO. Jake Weber, often underused in a thankless role on the TV series Medium, also has a good part as the intelligence officer overseeing the mission.

But there is a mark against the film too, which will certainly bother some people more than others. Though this story is a work of fiction, it is based in the reality of several missions in World War II where Enigma code machines were captured from the Germans. In the bulk of these missions -- including the one in particular that is arguably closest to this movie's fictitious plot -- the naval crews that succeeded were British. In this movie? Yee-haw!!! All American!!!

One more time... this is fiction. And yet it hews closely enough to history that it seems to do injustice to the real people involved to take the credit off of the British sailors and give it to a bunch of Americans. I understand the reality of it being a Hollywood movie, made for American audiences, and yet what would we think of, say, a movie depicting a fictionalized version of the first moon landing in which an Irishman takes that "one small step?" Whether this detracts from the movie is going to vary from person to person. You might not care about the history. Or might be able to just take the movie as a piece of entertainment separate from any of that.

Or hell, you just might not like it as much as I did. But I have to say that for two hours, I feel like this movie delivers all the thrills an action-suspense movie should. I rate it an A-. We'll see, once I've finished putting the new list back together, whether that's good enough for a slot.