Harpoon

6/1/2026

Harpoon (2019) is a yacht survival movie. This is a tricky thing to pull off. You want it to be character-driven, but you need it to be actor-driven. Would Dead Calm work without Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, and Billy Zane? Would All Is Lost (the one-man variation) work without Robert Redford? On the basis of Harpoon, no. They would not. Then again, this film could star the Holy Trinity working for scale and it wouldn’t matter, because the script is narrator-driven, and the narrator isn’t even a character. He’s an omniscient snark machine — a Greek chorus for assholes. The narrator doesn’t serve the story; the story serves him. The voiceover begins before the film even does. Within the first five minutes, the movie literally freeze-frames twice while the narrator dumps exposition.