Director Craig Gillespie seems to be shaping up as Disney’s
current go-to guy to direct feel-good stories of true story triumphs in the
face of adversity, a staple of their live-action stable of films produced for
the apparent sole purpose of giving high school teachers an excuse to provide
their students with a distraction under the pretense of educational value. The
Finest Hours fits this mold pretty precisely, and much like Gillespie’s
previous film, Million Dollar Arm,
the film is competent, yet unlikely to leave much of a lasting impression once
the credits start rolling.
Set on and off the coast of Cape Cod in 1952, The Finest Hours opens on the romantic
entanglement and eventual engagement of Bernie (Chris Pine, as wooden as his
namesake), a coastguardsman, and Miriam (Holliday Grainger), a "strong female character" who makes up for lack of agency with a pointless amount of screentime. When an immense storm tears an oil tanker in
half just off the coast, Bernie is sent to retrieve the crewmen of the ship and
leave his fiancée behind for what appears to be a suicide mission. Meanwhile, the crew of the tanker, led by the
ship’s chief engineer (Casey Affleck, as forgettable as ever), fights to
survive as the remains of the ship slowly submerge.
The film’s biggest problem is that it tries to split its
running time evenly between the two plots, except without proper proportional
investment given to either side.
Gillespie seems to want the Bernie/Miriam romance to be the emotional
center of the film, yet the two aren’t much further developed that stock archetypes,
and watching Bernie struggle against waves in his rescue boat starts to wear
thin after watching it for nearly the entire last hour of the film. Conversely, the more interesting action takes
place on the sinking tanker, yet none of the characters on that ship are
invested with much, if any, distinguishing characteristics, making them hard to
care about or relate to. This makes the
two hour runtime of the film drag on interminably, since the film doesn’t place
its emotional investment where it matters.
Yet, despite my glib commentary on the actors, their
performances are actually decently serviceable given the trite circumstances of
the script and their characterization in it.
They’re all eminently watchable and the production values of the film
are on par with just about any natural disaster flick of recent memory, with
computer generated waves bringing a functional level of distress to the
table. But ultimately, this is a bland
piece of January theater fodder, a film that Disney produced and likely
regretted once it saw the final product, and given their usual high standards
for their output, this merely functions as a tedious distraction. If you’re looking for a bare minimum of
watchability, The Finest Hours serves
that function, because nothing about it is blatantly awful; it’s just that
nothing about it is particularly good either.
This is making me wonder whether Young Frankenstein is still the only movie shown on movie days at my old middle school.
ReplyDeleteWe did watch Twister in math class shortly before my parents pulled me out and put me in algebra.