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Movie Review: “The Finest Hours” Fails To Conjure The Perfect Storm

[yasr_overall_rating]
 

The Coast Guard makes a daring rescue attempt off the coast of Cape Cod after a pair of oil tankers are destroyed during a blizzard in 1952.

“Disheartening” would be a gross underestimation when it comes to describing Hollywood’s tendency to corrupt aspiring, talented filmmakers. While there are a few directors who, despite the gold-plated allure of the system, stay true to their original visions and keep the independent spirit alive (thank you, Tom McCarthy), others simply cannot resist the temptation to, for lack of a better term, “sell out.”

And who can blame them, really? If you were, say, Colin Trevorrow, and made a $750,000 charming indie, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” would you say “no” to directing two of the biggest sequels of all time (the $150 mil. “Jurassic World” and the upcoming “Star Wars: Episode IX,” whose budget is so large, they could build an eighth continent with it)? High-powered execs pluck cheap talent, with reservoirs of potential – Sundance hits, like “Looper” (whose director, Rian Johnson, is now busy working on “Star Wars: Episode VIII”) – but instead of maximizing on that potential, they restrict directors, distorting their imaginations with preconceived notions of what the general public wants. The extent to which a director can express his creative vision is inversely proportional to the budget of the film. The filmmakers’ hands are therefore cuffed, and they have no choice but to bow at the producers’ whim. Movies are chopped and rewritten, to appease everyone, to bombard with forgettable, PG-13 thrills.

Though it’s getting progressively more difficult in this day and age of studio-driven cinema, some filmmakers still manage to have creative control over big-budget product (Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and, to a lesser degree, Joss Whedon, come to mind), and/or to use the profits from those films to keep making their art. Craig Gillespie’s coastguard action drama “The Finest Hours” unfortunately signals the aforementioned corruption of a talented artist. The man who once directed the sensitive and warm-hearted “Lars and the Real Girl,” and showed some promise with the bigger-budget remake “Fright Night,” now bombards his audience with the most stereotypical genre tropes, wasting an intriguingly unconventional cast in a “been-there-seen-that-a-million-times” sappy Hollywood “thrill ride.” A few moments of adrenaline notwithstanding – it’s Disney, after all, and we’re on a roller-coaster – your finest hours will be spent avoiding this film, and watching one of Gillespie’s older “United States of Tara” episodes instead.

Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) is the somewhat-shy-but-determined-and-handsome hero, a Cape Cod coastguard. Early in the film, Bernie falls for Miriam (Holliday Grainger), a local naive-but-loyal-and-beautiful young woman. When she proposes to him at a spectacularly romantic dance, he looks her straight in the eye and says, “No.” Distraught, Miriam runs out into the wintry night, yet it doesn’t take long for Bernie to explain to her, Spider Man-style, that his job is too dangerous, and he simply cares too much for her…so, oh well, okay, yes, he’ll marry her. Miriam falls into Bernie’s arms again, willing to take the risk and dedicate her one-dimensional existence to this young lad with a penchant for danger.

In the meantime, maritime drama occurs off the Cape Cod coast: after a captain’s refusal to slow down in a storm, an oil tanker capsizes, snapping into two pieces. One half sinks immediately; the other stays afloat. The remaining crew, led by the blank-faced Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) – pronounced “sea-bird” – begin arguing about life boats, before Sybert silences them with an axe (yep, it happens), and some grim facts: “We’re sinking. (Beat.) If we lose the power, we lose the pumps. (Beat.)” They have about “four or five hours,” during which they build a manual tiller, to steer the boat to shallow waters. For those of us who don’t understand the concept of “steering,” Sybert, taking cues from “Interstellar”’s “wormhole pencil” sequence, uses an egg to helpfully demonstrate the tiller’s effects.

When another oil tanker capsizes in the area nearby, the crew worries, “If everyone’s getting them, who’s gonna come for us?” Well, Chris Effin’ Pine, that’s who! Ordered by insecure commander Daniel Cluff (Eric Bana) to assemble a team, Bernie picks his friend Richie (Ben Foster) and a few other heroic misfits, and they embark on a perilous journey, on the tiniest boat, through the most vicious of snowstorms this side of Jonas. “They’re sending you out to death,” the local wise fishermen warn them. And so the rescue begins.

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Chris Pine’s Bernie gets most of the film’s unintentionally funny lines. “Sometimes people go out and don’t come back,” Bernie says, to which Miriam tearfully (and sensibly) responds, “Are you talking about the storm or the marriage?” When confronted to turn back by Richie halfway through their adventure, Bernie hesitates, then solemnly intones, “Not on my watch.” Later, he addresses a potential sinking situation: “We all live, we all die.. right?” Um, have you seen “Titanic?” There’s no room on that lifeboat, Bernie.

Speaking of which, at least the freezing temperature was more-or-less accurately rendered in Cameron’s beloved epic, with DiCaprio’s face turning white before icing up and disappearing underwater. No one seems truly cold in “The Finest Hours,” all rosy cheeks and maybe – just maybe – the occasional tremble. Aren’t those supposed to be below-freezing temperatures?

The film’s subplot stinks. I find it offensive how they just had to add a talented actress to play “the wife,” in this testosterone-driven story of men in peril. There’s even a scene that lousily attempts to address 1950s bigotry, in which Miriam begs Daniel Cuff, at least 800 times, to “please call them back,” to no avail. The issue here is that her character – and her storyline – is so underdeveloped, the film, in its thickheaded determination to avoid accusations of sexism for not including a woman at all, instead becomes that much more sexist by reducing its one female part to a peripheral footnote. “The Finest Hours” reiterates the point that Hollywood is going about the whole “casting women” thing in a completely wrong way – but that’s a subject for a different essay.

Eric Bana and Ben Foster, both highly talented actors, are wildly underused. Casey Affleck literally sleepwalks through the blizzard – the guy’s normally got infinitely more screen presence than his famous brother, but here seems to be cashing it way in. Characters remain at arm’s length, displaying no real chemistry, no dynamic or intrigue – they are only slightly less disposable than the fools inhabiting Michael Bay universes.

In typical Hollywood fashion, characterization comes second – or third, or fourth – to the spectacle, and “The Finest Hours” does deliver in some scenes, particularly the ones involving Bernie’s boat crashing, rolling and piercing through the giant waves, as well as some sequences involving Sybert’s crew. That said, the whole “massive-wave-flips-boat” vs. “men-yelling” thing gets repetitive quite fast. There is also one cool, memorable shot, tracking the crew, as they yell out an order to change the boat’s speed and direction, passing it along until its execution, which only serves as a reminder that it’s THE one cool, memorable shot in the entire film.

“The Finest Hours” provides no real insight into what it means to be a coastguard, or a crew member of an oil tanker. It reduces its one female role to a redundant subplot. Every beat is predictable, making one wish Gillespie added at least a few colorful lines or unexpected plot twists. Guess the studio took the reign on this one.

In theaters January 29th

 
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Alex Saveliev

Alex graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a BA in Film & Media Arts and studied journalism at the Northwestern University in Chicago. While there, he got acquainted with the late Roger Ebert, who supported and inspired Alex in his career as a screenwriter and film critic. Alex has produced, written and directed a short zombie film, “Parched,” which is being distributed internationally and he is developing a series for a TV network, and is in pre-production on a major motion picture.