Opioid crisis exposé settles for easy thrills
“Crisis” is an undercover cop thriller, a revenge thriller and a corporate thriller. So you certainly get your money’s worth of thrill highs from writerdirector Nicholas Jarecki’s followup to his intriguing feature debut, the financial thriller “Arbitrage.”
What “Crisis” — in theaters nationwide Friday, Feb. 26, and on video on demand Friday, March 5 — isn’t enough of is a serious examination of the opioid addiction epidemic that’s plagued the nation for many years. While Jarecki’s film, which is claimed to be inspired by true events, drops knowledge about ways dangerous drugs get made, smuggled
and sometimes approved at the highest government levels despite their lifedestroying risk factors, it’s mostly built to get us off on suspense and the easy rewards of moral outrage.
This smart, wellresearched movie satisfies in some ways but feels diluted in others. Its pacing is most impressive. Jarecki keeps three moreorless distinct, complicated narrative threads barreling along with little to no muddling, and knows when he needs to slow down to clarify information or spotlight emotions. Problems arise when the storytelling falls back on boilerplate dialogue and predictable plot turns.
Toggling between a wintry Detroit and Montreal, “Crisis” features Armie Hammer as DEA agent Jake Kelly, who’s involved in a deepcover sting operation to nail Armenian gangsters with Chinese fentanyl smuggled from Canada.
There’s also Michigan mom Claire Reimann (Evangeline Lilly), an architect kicking her own oxycodone dependence, who goes understandably “Death Wish” when her straightarrow teenage son turns up dead from an overdose. Elsewhere in the state, Dr. Tyrone Brower, Gary Oldman’s chemistry department head at an unnamed university, is alarmed by his research lab’s test results for Klaralon, a breakthrough “nonaddictive” painkiller that a Big Pharma company is paying the school handsomely to verify as safe and effective.
With an apt, starving animal demeanor, Lilly is the most compelling and convincing of the three leads. Shattered by grief just as she was getting her life in order, compulsive Reimann really makes you worry, not just for herself but also for her prey, innocent bystanders and anyone in between who may cross her path.
Oldman employs a lot of techniques we’ve seen him use before, eyes widening and rising voice shaking as Brower encounters roadblock after unsurprising roadblock to his whistleblowing efforts. It’s still an effective performance, if the one most reliant on the character’s justifiable selfrighteousness.
In one of the last roles we’re likely to see him do for a while, Hammer’s shrewd, brave and intimidating cop is such a professional job that it can be watched without thinking of the sex scandal that’s engulfing the actor. Until, maybe, when Kelly zipties his stoned, junkie sister (LilyRose Depp) on her bed and tells their mother to leave her there for the next two days. Kudos to Jarecki for keeping that powerful scene in the final cut. Warnings to anyone who could be triggered by it.
There’s solid supporting work from Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, Luke Evans, Kid Cudi and many others in twodimensional roles. Veteran Quebecois actor Guy Nadon makes the most memorable impression as the Canadian drug kingpin called Mother; he’s smooth and scary, but irresistibly personable about it all.
Two of the main story lines converge toward the end in both pleasing (not quite how you expected) and frustrating (easy to see how they could have been gnarlier) ways. That’s like much of “Crisis” overall. It’s a more modest “Traffic” in several ways, adequate at what it tries to say about this dirty business, but light on the wider scope of the suffering that it causes. Because there actually is a crisis, maybe it should be addressed with more of an emphasis on authentic details than on genre conventions.