A SHIPSHAPE THRILLER
With a dishy hero, wild seas and a heart-stopping rescue, this shipwreck disaster movie will definitely float your boat
The Finest Hours (12A) Verdict: Stirring shipwreck drama ★★★★✩ Triple 9 (15) Verdict: Incoherent thriller ★✩✩✩✩
SCARCELY have the waters closed over Ron Howard’s In The Heart Of The Sea, which I liked although it sank without trace at the box office, than there arrives another wave- tossed, stormbattered maritime melodrama.
The Finest Hours tells the true story of a spectacular rescue off the coast of Massachusetts in the winter of 1952, after an oil tanker broke in two in turbulent seas.
It is still considered the most accomplished small-boat rescue in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Australian director Craig Gillespie’s fine, rather old-fashioned film chugs slowly towards the eye of the action, carefully building our emotional investment in its hero, appealingly played by Chris Pine.
This is the dishy but tongue-tied Bernie Webber, a young man almost cripplingly respectful of authority and, as a product of the era’s social conservatism, strikingly reminiscent of Emory Cohen’s character in the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn.
We follow Bernie courting the lively Miriam (British actress Holliday Grainger, also excellent) so tentatively that it is she who eventually pops the question. Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, a storm is building.
Gillespie doesn’t wrap much of a narrative round the film’s other hero, the stricken tanker’s taciturn engineer Ray Sybert ( Casey Affleck), a loner not much liked by his crewmates.
But when the fore section breaks apart, taking the captain and officers with it to the ocean bed, Sybert assumes control.
The only chance for survival, he realises, is to steer what remains of the vessel on to shallow rocks. Even run aground, however, it will not withstand the mighty waves for long.
Back at the Coast Guard station, Bernie is ordered to lead what looks like a hopeless, possibly even suicidal rescue mission.
In thrall to his touchy boss (Eric Bana), and haunted by an unsuccessful bid to save a fishing crew in distress a year earlier, Bernie takes three doughty volunteers and skippers a 36ft boat directly into the film’s splendid special effects.
JUST
getting out of the harbour is a formidable challenge, requiring all his expert seamanship. Moreover, the boat is built to carry only 12, yet there are 32 survivors.
Gradually, it becomes clear why the screenplay (by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, the team behind 2010’s The Fighter) has so painstakingly built up Bernie’s obedient nature on land; it is so he can flout it at sea.
In a bar, at a dance, with his elders, his self- confidence is flimsy. But piloting a small boat through waves the size of four- storey buildings, he finds it in spades.
Once the mission is under way, Gillespie switches neatly between the rescue boat, the oil tanker, and mounting alarm on shore.
It’s stirringly done, and even though what’s left of the tanker is to an extent crewed by character types — the sullen subversive, the terrified rookie, the cheerful lionheart and so on — the picture is somehow none the worse for it.
I could have done with a less histrionic score, but then what’s a crisis at sea without percussion and strings?
Alfred Hitchcock learned the truth of that during the making of Lifeboat (1944), when he sent an underling to complain to the
production’s head of music. the gist of his message was that there was no need for a swelling orchestra to keep time with swelling waters, because, after all, why would there be music in the middle of the ocean?
‘Please tell Mr Hitchcock,’ came the reply, ‘that I’ll explain why there’s music out there if he explains why there’s a camera.’
n It WAS a fair cop, which is more than can be said for any of the law-enforcers in Triple 9, a ridiculous bombs-and-bullets thriller set in Atlanta, Georgia, which crams corrupt police, Jewish mobsters, bank heists, car chases, torture, prostitution and even fatherly love into a running time of just under two hours, leaving no room for a coherent narrative.
the film cannot, however, be faulted for its cast. Kate Winslet, last seen breathlessly accepting a Bafta award for her portrayal as Polish-born Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs, further bolsters her claim to be considered Britain’s answer to Meryl Streep, by Streepishly nailing yet another accent, this time as Irina, a Russian-Israeli gangster with hair like Peter Stringfellow after a jog through a wind tunnel. ALSO present are Chiwetel Ejiofor and Aaron Paul as bent cops, Woody Harrelson as a slightly less bent cop, and Casey Affleck (it’s Casey Affleck week!) as a cop apparently not bent at all.
the film’s title refers to police radio code for ‘ officer down’; killing one of their own being the only way the rogue cops can distract the rest of the Atlanta force while they carry out a series of violent heists for Irina’s mob. Pared right down, or alternatively stretched over 26 episodes for a television series, all this might be moderately gripping. But from the start, it’s way too energetic for its own good.
the director is another Australian, John Hillcoat, who made a wonderful job of an outback- set western, the Proposition, a decade ago. that pulsated with menace.
this, by contrast, pulsates merely with angry men running, leaping, swearing and shooting, for reasons far better known to themselves than to a mystified audience.