A new movie based on the book “The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue,” is the kind of thriller that tries to get the audience excited by constantly reminding them that what we’re seeing is impossible.
“There’s no way they can get over that sandbar!” “This [insert hopeless situation] is a hopeless situation!” “We’ll never make it back to shore!”
Of course in this tale of greatest generation gumption most everything is going to work out well and that lack of any real stakes sucks much of the tension out of “The Finest Hours.”
Set in 1952 against the backdrop of a brutal New England nor’easter, the action begins when an oil tanker is ripped in half, stranding thirty soldiers in a floating coffin. As it fills with water their chances of survival reduce by the minute. On board engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) makes desperate attempts to stay afloat, hoping against hope that someone will brave the vicious 70-foot waves to rescue them.
Luckily for them a four-man Coast Guard crew led by Boatswains Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine along with Ben Foster, John Magaro and Kyle Gallner) in a small motor lifeboat CG 36500 are willing to brave the waves and bring the men back home.
The bulk of the film takes place on the water—imagine the H2O budget!—but while the men are battling the elements their families—most notably Bernie’s fiancée Miriam (Holliday Granger)—anxiously await the return of their loved ones from the grip of the storm.
“The Finest Hours” is a big, handsome movie with stern jawed heroes and plucky dames. It’s a story about the men who go to sea in ships, weather bombs and Hollywood heroism. It’s also a tad dull. Director Craig Gillespie doesn’t skimp on the action—there are waves a plenty—and the men are thrown into one precarious situation after the next but beyond the most cursory character work it never feels like a great deal of thought was put into the people populating the screen. Pine turns Bernie into a shy, insecure man who finds his heroic side but the charisma the actor usually brings to his roles is missing. The other actors hand in competent performances but the characters are so underwritten it feels as if they stumbled out of Central Casting before Gillespie shanghaied them for this film.
With few compelling characters the movie drifts along, hoping to reel you in with big, splashy (literally) visuals, but it’s all for naught. Filling the screen with action might entertain the eye but if you don’t care about the characters, how can you care about the action?
“The Finest Hours” has its heart in the right place but is sunk by earnestness and mannered presentation.
In “Deliver Us From Evil” Eric Bana is Sarchie, an NYPD cop partnered with Butler (Joel McHale), his wisecracking sidekick.
Like Messrs. Tango and Cash, they are fearless but somewhat mismatched. Sarchie is a cop with “radar,” a nose for trouble, while Butler is a wisenheimer who, when a disheveled suspect grimaces at him, foaming at the mouth, says, “Do you think she’s single?”
A series of seemingly unrelated 911 calls—a domestic dispute, an incident at a zoo and a possible home invasion—change the story from cop drama to supernatural police procedural. Strange things happen. Holy candles won’t burn in the house of one of the 911 callers. One of the perps speaks Latin and scratches until her fingers bleed.
Skeptical at first Sarchie refuses to blame “invisible fairies” for the strange behavior, but working with a Jesuit Priest, Father Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez), Sarchie and Butler become convinced there is more at play here than just human nature.
The investigation leads them to a trio of men, (Chris Coy, Dorian Missick and Sean Harris) soldiers who returned from Iraq with PTDS (Post Traumatic Demonic Possession.) Piecing together the links becomes a dangerous job for Butler, Sarchie and even the officer’s family (Oliver Munn and daughter played by Lulu Wilson).
“Delivers Us From Evil” relies on jump scares—those “boo” moments that get your heart racing—and while a few of the jumps work, most simply deliver a jolt with nothing behind it, but there is at least one shock cat lovers are going to h-a-t-e.
There is plenty of atmosphere—apparently it rains all the time in the Bronx—and a few creepy moments—was that a snake or an old pipe?—but the truly eerie stuff is underplayed when a movie like this should be really dialing up the action.
It’s all a bit dull. There are no truly memorable moments. We’ve seen the exorcism stuff before—without the head spinning and pea soup—in everything from “The Exorcist” to “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” but the thing that really sinks the movie’s momentum aren’t the stock characters or lack of new thrills but the exposition scenes that explain the obvious. Director Scott Derrickson, who also made the considerably creepier “Sinister,” doesn’t trust the audience to follow the simple story so he has the characters walk us through it almost one line at a time.
“Deliver Us From Evil” doesn’t feel like a summer movie. Usually we look to July and August to deliver us from lame movies but this one has the feel of those horror flicks starring a familiar-but-less-than-household-name that fills up theatres in January and February.
The spooky new supernatural thriller Deliver Us From Evil sees Eric Bana play a jaded NYC police officer. “I’ve seen some horrible things,” he says, “but nothing that can’t be explained by human nature.”
That changes when he meets a renegade priest (Édgar Ramírez) who convinces him a plague of demonic possession has infected the Big Apple. Working together, they combat the evil forces with exorcism and faith.
Deliver Us From Evil is based on a nonfiction book of the same name authored by Ralph Sarchie (with Lisa Collier Cool), a sixteen-year NYPD veteran who investigates “cases of demonic possession and (assists) in the exorcisms of humanity’s most ancient—and most dangerous—foes,” in his spare time.
“Before going out on a case,” he writes, “I put aside my gun and police badge and arm myself with holy water and a relic of the True Cross.”
Sarchie’s story joins a long list of exorcism movies with roots in true events.
The Exorcist, the granddaddy of all demon possession movies, is based in part on the 1949 case of an anonymous Maryland teenager dubbed Roland Doe. He was determined by the Catholic Church to be under a diabolical spell when strange things started happening — levitating furniture and holy water vials crashing to the ground — after he played with a Ouija board.
Exorcist author William Peter Blatty first heard about Doe’s story when he was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1950. He drew from newspaper reports and a diary kept by the attending priest, Fr. Raymond Bishop, as the backbone of his novel.
The character of Father Lankester Merrin, the elderly priest and archeologist played by Max von Sydow in the movie, was based on British archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. Blatty said Harding “was the physical model in my mind when I created the character, whose first name, please note, is Lankester.”
In recent years hits like The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true events.
Finally in The Possession, a haunted antique carved “Dybbuk” box — containing an evil, restless spirit — turns the behaviour of a young girl (Natasha Calis) from angelic to animalistic. The owner of the real-life box offered to send it to producer Sam Raimi but the filmmaker declined. “I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said. “I’m scared of the thing.”
When British author H.G. Wells created the term “time machine” way back in 1895, he could never have imagined the lasting impact his ideas of fourth dimension travel would have on the career of Rachel McAdams.
His book, The Time Machine, has been filmed twice for the big screen, but the ideas of shifting ripples of time have also inspired three very different movies starring the London, Ont., born actress.
This weekend she co-stars with Domhnall Gleeson and Bill Nighy in About Time as the present day girlfriend of a 21-year-old who uses his ability to switch time zones to learn information to woo her.
“I know I have a little bit of time travel in my past but this is different,” McAdams says. “The element of time travel thrown in was unique and quirky and dealt with lightly.”
Previously the Mean Girls star appeared as Clare Abshire in The Time Traveler’s Wife, starring opposite Eric Bana playing a Chicago librarian with a genetic disorder known as Chrono-Displacement that causes him to involuntarily travel through time.
From the outset their relationship is a strange one. When they first meet she has known him since she was six years old, but because his syndrome flips him to random times in his life on an ever shifting timeline he is always meeting her for the first time. Confused? Not as confused as Clare, who tries to build a life with Henry even though his ailment keeps them apart.
Based on a best-selling novel, it’s a three-hankie story about love with no boundaries and how romance can transcend everything, even death.
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris it’s Owen Wilson who jumps through time — finding himself transported back to 1920s Paris and hanging with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), seeing Cole Porter sing at a party, drinking with Hemmingway — while McAdams stays put, bringing him back to reality, as his irritating present-day fiancée Inez.
But what about actual time travel? When she was asked by AOL if there was anything she would go back in time and change in real life, McAdams said, “I was a figure skater, so I would take back a lot of fashion choices on the ice. A lot of sequins. I would pull back on the sequins a little bit and maybe less blue eye shadow.”
Is Saoirse Ronan the new Meryl Streep? For years Streep was almost as well known for her facility with world accents as she was for her acting ability. Her aptitude for everything from Danish (“The Bridges of Madison County”) to Polish (“Sophie’s Choice”) to New Zealand (“A Cry in the Dark”) to Bronx (“Doubt”) to Midwestern (“A Prairie Home Companion”) dialects became such a topic of conversation that even her Wikipedia page has a section titled “Accents and dialects.”
Now, along comes Ronan, a prodigiously talented young actress, who speaks with an Irish brogue in real life, but uses a variety of inflections on-screen. Scottish (“Atonement”), American (“The Lovely Bones), Polish (“The Way Back”) and English (“Death Defying Acts”)—she can do it all.
In her new film, “Hanna” she aces a German accent putting her one step closer to Streep territory. She plays the title character, a blonde, blue-eyed killing machine, the right age to be a Hannah Montana fan, except she’s never heard music and has no idea who Miley Cyrus is. She was home-schooled with über tough love by her father and ex-CIA agent Eric (Eric Bana) in the remotest part of Finland. He trains her to survive, to adapt or die. When her boot camp is completed she activates an electronic signal and with the words, “Marissa Wiegler, come and get me,” begins a wild life-or-death chase through Morocco and Europe. CIA operative Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) is desperate to bring Hanna in before a secret about her past is revealed.
“Hanna” isn’t exactly an action movie, although there are a number of breathless fight scenes, it’s more of a coming-of-age story about a feral girl learning about the outside world. Director Joe Wright weaves the action sequences throughout, but never forgets to develop Hanna’s character. Ronan plays her almost like an alien or someone from another time. She’s unaccustomed to TV, electricity and the comforts of modern life and you can really see the learning curve on the actresses’ open face. It’s a remarkable performance aided by Wright’s sure handed direction. Set to an anxiety inducing soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers he frames every scene with its own personality. For instance, when Hanna is with an English family she adopts for a time, the pace is gentle, there’s music and the tone is poignant as she observes a real family for the first time in her life. When she’s on her own the settings are discordant and strange.
It’s engrossing filmmaking—check out Hanna’s introduction to the modern world in a hotel in Morocco—that wordlessly brings the viewer into Hanna’s world.
“Hanna” is as good a thriller as we’ve seen for a long time, but it’s about more than just the thrills. There’s genuine heart here and that’s what makes it great. That and the mini-Meryl acting skills of Saoirse Ronan.
“You’re making me angry,” says Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) before transforming into the muscle bound Hulk. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.” Oh yes we will Bruce. In fact, we like you lot more when you’re angry. Director Ang Lee has taken the comic book bully’s story and added touches of intelligence, style and grace, everything in fact, except personality. Bana (whose Ken doll hair I found very distracting) plays Banner as an emotionally detached zombie, draining him of any spark.
Recent Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly doesn’t fare much better. Her Betty Ross is a pretty picture – beautiful to look at, but lacking in any dimension. It is amazing that a movie which expects the audience to buy a wild chemical explanation as to why Banner blows up into his hulking alter ego can have so little chemistry between its two lead actors. There is barely a glimmer when they are on-screen together.
Not so when the big guy enters the picture. The CGI creation is part King Kong, part Frankenstein and all Harryhausen, but yet seems like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Like Frankie and Kong before him, he capable of mindless violence and mass destruction, also has a gentle, compassionate side. In one scene that seems to echo King Kong, Hulk picks up Betty in his massive fist before gently placing her on the roof of a car so he car get a better look at her. Here we see the marvels of the CGI and the Hulk’s wonderfully expressive face. This collection of pixels and binary code ironically brings the movie to life. Of course the Hulk on a rampage is more fun, but Lee paces the action carefully, barely giving us a glimpse of the main attraction until almost an hour into the film, and then uses him sparingly.
People expecting to see an action movie will be sorely disappointed. Hulk (the movies drops “the”) has its moments – the battle with the killer mutant dogs is exciting and violent while Hulk’s desert show-down with the army has the makings of a classic in the superhero oeuvre – but favours the cerebral over the physical. Most of the action here takes place inside Bruce Banner’s mind as he battles with his fate. Hulk historians will note that stylistically Lee has crafted a film using crazy jump-cuts, dissolves and split screens that emulates the wild design of the original comic books.
The supporting cast fares much better than the above the title actors. Josh Lucas hands in a one-note performance as the fleabag military weapons contractor turned Hulk’s punching bag, but seems to be having a good time while doing it. Sam Elliott plays Ross, an army muckety-muck who is bent on destroying the green blowtop. In the hands of a lesser actor this would have been a stereotypical turn as the paranoid, untrusting military man. Instead Elliot gives us the stiff façade of a career warrior, but reveals a softer core – someone who is tormented by the unpleasant choices he has to make.
But it is Nick Nolte’s scene chewing that steals the movie. With his hair standing on end (think of the famous mug shot from last September) and wild eyes blazing Nolte is an organic visual effect that rivals his CGI co-star. As David Banner, the scientist father of the Hulk, he experimented with his own DNA and passed the genetic flaw on to his son. The elder Banner is only playing with only 44 cards in the deck, and Nolte’s over-the-top performance makes his a riveting character.
Hulk may have its flaws, but Ang Lee has done something really interesting here. He’s taken the hoary old superhero genre and freshened it up visually while adding a level of thoughtfulness and context that is missing from other movies of its kind.
In Lucky You Eric Bana plays a professional card shark trying to raise enough money to compete in the World Series of Poker at a Las Vegas hotel. Things haven’t been going well for him. His father, poker legend LC Cheever (Robert Duvall) is back in town; he loses a ten thousand dollar bet; the girl of his dreams, lounge singer Billie (Drew Barrymore), dumps him when he steals money from her and he gets roughed up by some Vegas thugs. If it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.
Fortune, however, favors the bold, especially in Hollywood, and he finds a way to come up with the money, play kissy face with Billie and get his private life in order all in one marathon two hour plus movie. It’s Cincinnati Kid-lite, a movie about the gritty sub-culture of Vegas gamblers that is completely without grit.
Director Curtis Hanson, best known as the helmer behind L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile, has succeeded in the past by creating interesting, richly textured worlds for his movies to inhabit. The former wouldn’t have been as effective if not for the lush, sexy and dangerous Los Angeles he created, and the latter’s grungy depiction of the wrong side of Detroit’s tracks added a great deal of flavor to that film. Both seemed authentic and were integral parts of those movies. Lucky You isn’t so fortunate to have such a well defined sense of place. Las Vegas is probably the least authentic city on the planet. Everything there is artifice, which should create interesting possibilities to for a director to place some real people in amongst the surreal surroundings. Instead Hanson’s Las Vegas is populated by characters we’ve seen before—wacky locals who’ll bet on anything, the down-on-his-luck gambler, and the supportive love interest.
Eric Bana has been given four shots at A-list stardom in the past few years—more than anyone else I can think of—and yet leaves virtually no impression on me as a viewer. I wanted to like him in The Hulk, but found his performance flat. I barely remember him in Troy even though he was second billed to Brad Pitt and in Munich he, once again, failed to impress. As Huck in Luck You, a gambling addicted poker player with deep personal issues, we should understand his compulsion. Instead he spouts a handful of catch-phrases which are suppose to shed light on his compulsion, but end up sounding more like excuses than explanations. Unfortunately Bana just isn’t strong enough or interesting enough an actor to carry this kind of material.
Barrymore is wasted in a supporting role that requires little more from her than to be the resilient and supportive girlfriend.
Third billed lead Robert Duvall, however, schools both these younger actors in how to walk through material like this with your dignity intact. His performance as L.C. Cheever is the highlight of the film.
Lucky You? Lucky you if you don’t have to sit through this.
This past Christmas season saw two movies hit the theatres that could easily have been Stephen Spielberg productions—The Chronicles of Narnia and King Kong. Both feature the kind of fantasy that he made his name with, and both are the kind of large epic style films that he has as deft touch with. Instead we were treated to the flip side of Spielberg—the serious filmmaker.
Munich is loosely based on the book Vengeance by Canadian journalist George Jonas and details the aftermath of the Black September terror raid at the 1972 Olympics in Munich in which eleven Israeli athletes were murdered. In retaliation, the Israeli government recruited a group of Mossad agents to track down and execute those responsible for the attack.
Eric Bana plays the head of the team of Mossad hit men, and for my money is the film’s tragic flaw. Bana has been given three shots at A-list stardom in the past couple of years—more than anyone else I can think of—and yet leaves virtually no impression on me as a viewer. I wanted to like him in The Hulk, but found his performance flat. I barely remember him in Troy even though he was second billed to Brad Pitt and now in Munich he, once again, fails to impress. As Avner, a former bodyguard of Golda Meir, we should believe that he is willing to do anything for his country, that he is an ideologue who is willing to break the law to get revenge, but also feel empathy for him. Unfortunately Bana just isn’t strong enough or interesting enough an actor to carry this kind of material.
Munich is a technically well-made film, although seems a bit flabby. Overlong at 164 minutes, the movie often feels like a grocery list of assassinations. One after the other people are stalked and blown up with very little variance in their modus operandi. Mid-way through I was dreading having to sit through all eleven killings. Luckily the movie is more than simply a revenge drama, and starts to take a different shape as Avner’s conscience gets the best of him. His moral wrestling match should be at the heart of the film, but unfortunately is a bit too obvious and in Bana’s hands doesn’t seem realistic.
Munich is an ambitious film that sags under its own weight.
A new movie based on the book “The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue,” is the kind of thriller that tries to get the audience excited by constantly reminding them that what we’re seeing is impossible.
