You might need a painkiller after watching the overstuffed opioid thriller ‘Crisis’
“Crisis” Rated: R for drug material, violence and crude language throughout. Running time: 118 minutes. ★ 1⁄2 (out of four)
There’s a bit of violence in the opioid thriller “Crisis,” but the well-worn path followed by this earnest if heavy-handed issue film is not exactly strewn with corpses. Not literally at least.
A squeaky-clean teen (Billy Bryk) dies of a suspicious overdose after getting mixed up, inadvertently, with drug couriers. Some lab mice keel over after being fed a designer painkiller, falsely touted as nonaddictive. The bodies of a couple of shady characters connected to a fentanyl-smuggling operation involving Canadians and Armenians turn up containing more lead than is healthy. Then there are a couple more stiffs, by the end of the film.
But between the skeletons in characters’ closets and the ghosts of movie cliches past, present and future, “Crisis” is something of a horror film, and not in a good way.
Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki (“Arbitrage”) — the half brother of acclaimed documentarians Andrew Jarecki (“Capturing the Friedmans,” “The Jinx”) and Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight”) — “Crisis” is a star-studded affair that follows three separate rippedfrom-the-headlines stories.
First, there’s the foulmouthed DEA agent (Armie Hammer) trying to reel in the big fish behind an international opioid-smuggling operation. (His sister, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is herself an addict.) Then there’s the mother of that dead teen (Evangeline Lilly), a recovering painkiller addict and avenging angel who embarks on a vigilante mission to find and kill the men she holds responsible for her son’s death - one of whom, in an unsubtle touch, is a bearded Quebecois heavy nicknamed Mother. Finally, there’s the idealistic but tarnished academic (Gary Oldman, in full, sputtering, declamatory mode), a whistleblower who struggles to expose the dangers of a deadly new painkiller nearing FDA approval. His résumé includes old innuendos about alcoholism and sexual harassment.
Rounding out the supporting cast are Michelle Rodriguez as a DEA supervisor; Luke Evans and Martin Donovan as corrupt drug-company executives; rapper-actor Kid Cudi as an ineffectual FDA bureaucrat; and Greg Kinnear as a university dean torn between supporting his faculty’s research and taking a fat check from Big Pharma for a new school arts center.
But forget the marquee names. This cinematic tripledecker sandwich is so overstuffed with baloney and cheese it ought to come with a pickle on the side.
Jarecki, who casts himself as a DEA agent, has clearly chosen a topic that’s worth exploring from several angles, as Steven Soderbergh did with “Traffic.” But the approach taken by “Crisis” to its complex subject is so obvious as to render anything the film might have to add to the discussion of addiction, greed or law enforcement perfunctory. Despite an effort to write characters as antiheroes who dance dangerously close to the edge of the moral abyss, the performances by Hammer, Lilly and Oldman all feel, effectively, like cardboard cutouts.
Originally called “Dreamland,” the far more urgently titled “Crisis” delivers a narrative - three of them, to be exact, with two on a collision course - that ultimately fails to meet the standard of an emergency. Despite a plot involving plenty of lawbreaking, the unengaging, even sleepy, goings-on never feel like something you’d call 911 about, except in one sense: This traffic jam of a movie is a pileup.