Bullock loses blindfold, keeps appeal
Netflix certainly gives us Sandra Bullock like we haven’t seen her before.
The likable star last appeared, often blindfolded, in the streaming service’s popular 2018 movie “Bird Box.” Now she’s back with “The Unforgivable” — playing in select theaters before coming to Netflix on Dec. 10 — as a glum ex-con, just released after serving 20 years for killing a sheriff.
The new film’s Ruth Slater is no Miss Congeniality, but I wouldn’t bet against Bullock’s fan base appreciating her in this change-of-pace, downbeat role. Even with a script that doesn’t provide much behavioral variety and goes in many wrong directions, Bullock commands the screen with little more than closed lips and wary stares. A few outbursts are built in for insurance against viewer attention drift, and she earns points just for trying to do more with less for most of the film.
An almost embarrassingly impressive supporting cast fills the other roles with more conventional aplomb.
Irish actress Aisling Franciosi (“The Nightingale”) plays Ruth’s younger sister Kate. She was 5 when the sheriff was shot while trying to evict them from their Washington state farmhouse. Kate’s memories of life before she was adopted by the nurturing, protective Malcolms (Richard Thomas and Linda Emond) are hazy at best.
Ruth wants nothing more than to see the sibling she raised like her own daughter, but the Malcolms and courts have prevented the sisters from communicating. Desperate for a solution, Ruth takes a day off from one of the few jobs a paroled cop killer can wrangle — cleaning fish at a Seattle packing plant — to seek clues to Kate’s whereabouts at the old homestead.
John and Liz Ingram (Vincent D’Onofrio and Viola Davis), a pair of lawyers who live in the tastefully refurbished house with their two sons, are unbelievably clueless at first about Ruth and the place’s history. When they find out, John wants to help the sad convict while Liz just might shoot her if she shows up again.
The final key family to this story, brothers Keith and Steve Whelan (Tom Guiry and Will Pullen), are the dead sheriff ’s sons. They have different ideas about making Ruth pay for wrecking their clan, but both are good at suspense-generating lurking.
Toss in Jon Bernthal (“The Walking Dead,” “The Punisher”) as the co-worker who finally makes Ruth smile and Rob Morgan (“This Is Us”) as her wise, wry parole officer, and you’ve got a Murderers’ Row of fine actors. Most of them have good scenes to play, too. But boy, does the script do overall disservice to the project.
Numerous flashbacks to the day of the crime manipulatively dole out info about what really happened, yet the surprise truth is easy to predict an hour before it’s revealed. The third act is rife with unnecessary (in one case ludicrous) twists and betrayals, which are only there to pile on melodrama. Speaking of betrayal, sure, an ex-con readjusting to a society still bent on judging her may not be the most engaging premise, but turning it into a crime thriller seems like a mug’s solution to that.
Director Nora Fingscheidt made the fantastic German film “System Crasher,” in which Helena Zengel (the astonishing girl from last year’s “News of the World”) played a raging foster child. Fingscheidt has an empathetic understanding of how states can both aid and fail their troubled wards. Some of that makes it through and buttresses “The Unforgivable,” which was adapted from the decade-old British TV series “Unforgiven.” Unlike “Crasher,” though, this film’s scenario prizes plot mechanics over examining characters and their place in society.
It’s a sin Bullock fans are likely to forgive. Even when she’s just staring out from the saddest faces she’s ever drawn, it’s hard not to love her.