This is not a drill, we are in seriously deep water ....
Haven’t we had enough of disaster movies? That’s what I was thinking as I settled down to watch Deepwater Horizon (12) ***** – an account of the 2010 drilling-rig crisis.
I didn’t stay settled long. Peter Berg’s movie grips like a surgical clamp, but its tale of environmental horror is told with such wrenching clarity that you’re constantly moving in your seat, desperate not to be trapped.
Just like Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg), the rig’s top electronics bod. No sooner have he and his boss Mr Jimmy (Kurt Russell) alighted on the Deepwater rig than they sense that BP’s site leader, Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich), cares less about safety than profit.
It should be said that this glorious dramatic opposition is a parody of what the real-life court case found. But there’s no denying the power of Berg’s story. Yes, he’s transformed a complex incident into a struggle ’twixt good and evil. But he’s also conjured up a spectacle of blasts and flares that never once loses interest in the people caught up in this chaos.
I could have done without the penultimate scene. Mike and his colleague Andrea (Gina Rodriguez) are trapped on the burning rig. What to do? Why, climb to the top of the rig, of course, the better to long-jump over the acres of burning ocean below. Yes, it’s fun. But it feels like a sop to standard-issue macho movie heroism.
The hero of Captain Fantastic (15) ** is a widower called Ben (Viggo Mortensen). He’s raising his six children far from civilisation, in the wilds. And he’s doing a good job of it. The kids are all engaging, intelligent, quizzical and far better informed than the average American adult. At which point writer/director Matt Ross caves in to convention and sets a clunking melodramatic plot in motion. Irascible father-in-law Jack (Frank Langella) disapproves of Ben’s hippie ways and schemes to take the kids into his own care. You can guess how sickly sweet what follows becomes, but Mortensen is resourceful enough to never let you forget the beauty of the original dream.
What, you were wondering, would John Michael McDonagh do after those masterpieces of fraught tragicomedy The Guard and Calvary? The answer, alas, is War On Everyone (15) **, a moronic pop-art shoot-’em-up full of charmless gangsters and unkillable cops. Avoid.