The submarine thriller "Hunter Killer" is now playing in theaters. (Courtesy/Lionsgate Company) 

I know this movie is named after a real thing, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking “Hunter Killer” sounds as though it was written by two 12-year-old boys imagining the greatest movie ever.

Rating: **1/2 (out of 5 stars)

After a Russian submarine is attacked by an unseen force in Russian waters, the American submarine tracking it also is attacked. Stateside, Adm. John Fisk (the rapper who goes by the name Common) wants to know why. He informs Adm. Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman) that he is sending a hunter-killer, a submarine designed to seek and destroy enemy subs, to investigate.

• See the movie’s trailer. 
• More about Gerard Butler.
• Another opinion about this movie. 

Donnegan questions Fisk, insisting no crew is nearby and the closest one doesn’t have a commander, but Fisk has already assigned someone to lead the mission — Capt. Joe Glass (Gerard Butler).

Glass is a somewhat unconventional but no-nonsense leader who is there to get answers and do what he needs to do to keep his crew alive and not start a war. What they don’t know is that Russian Defense Minister Durov (Mikhail Gorevoy) is quietly staging a coup against President Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko).

While investigating, they discover that the attacked Russian sub was sabotaged by Durov and the survivors on board include Capt. Sergei Andropov (Michael Nyqvist). On land, a Navy SEAL team gets evidence of the coup. Both the SEAL team and the hunter-killer team are ordered to rescue to Russian president.

There is no way they can pull it off unless enemies become allies and work together to prevent war.

“Hunter Killer” is directed by Donovan Marsh, the man who gave us the comedies “Spud” and “Spud 2: The Madness Continues” and the 2013 action thriller “Avenged.” 

I’d never even heard of any of those movies until I typed that paragraph.

I didn’t expect much from this movie. I felt like, based on other previews, it was nothing more than a direct-to-$5-DVD-bin-at-Walmart effort that managed to get a theatrical release.

The movie is kind of dumb and silly, but it’s at least an amusing dumb and silly. It’s not a train wreck (or submarine wreck in this case). It is an incredibly predictable story that offers little in the way of suspense. It’s the kind of project that Jerry Bruckheimer would have produced in the mid-to-late ’90s.

Despite my earlier jabs at him, Marsh, while not technically flashy, proves he is capable of shooting a Hollywood movie. I’ll be curious to see what he does when he is less of a director for hire and given a project where he’ll have control.

“Hunter Killer” is the kind of movie that in a world where other and better submarine films exist — “Das Boot,” “The Hunt for Red October” or, bringing it back to Bruckheimer, “Crimson Tide” — brings nothing new to the table.

If you’ve already streamed everything else once it hits Netflix or happen to catch it one afternoon on TBS, you could do worse.