Down Periscope (1996)

Down Periscope arrives from 1996, a service comedy in which Kelsey Grammer commands a rusted diesel submarine crewed by misfits and wins a war game through chicanery. David S. Ward directs with the enthusiasm of a man fulfilling a contract. The jokes land where they land. The film's cultural footprint is roughly the size of a barnacle, and it seems content with that.

On the subject of gender, the film makes a single gesture. Lauren Holly's Lieutenant Lake is assigned to the Stingray expressly to determine whether women can serve aboard submarines, a question the Navy apparently had not settled by 1996. The film treats this as a workplace inconvenience and a source of mild banter, never as an argument. She is competent, she is present, and the matter is dropped. Duane Martin appears as one of the crew, a Black sailor among white eccentrics, and the film says nothing about it, which is its own kind of restraint.

Everything else is absent. There is no same-sex anything, no climate anxiety, no critique of defense contractors despite the presence of a civilian engineer, no body-positive messaging, no framing of the crew's oddities as neurodivergence, no revisionist claim about naval history. The sermonizing instinct, so common in later comedies, is entirely missing. The film's closest thing to a moral is that oddballs can win, and it delivers that through slapstick and a mock execution involving a plank. It is a film about submarines. It does not wish to teach us anything. For that, in its modest way, it earns a measure of respect.