A real towering inferno, with BP as the bad guys
THE virtues of this surprisingly watchable film lie as much in its restraint as its excesses, which is itself a surprise — the director is Peter Berg, whose 2012 film Battleship, inspired by the board game, made you wish he’d preferred Ludo.
Deepwater Horizon was the name of the BP oil rig 41 miles off the Louisiana coast which blew out in April 2010, leading to a human and environmental catastrophe. Eleven men died, and for almost three months, more than 50,000 barrels of oil a day gushed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Some tragedies either don’t need the featurefilm treatment at all or should have longer to play out before they get it, and arguably this is one of them. But here the film is, so whether it has come too soon is a moot argument. Mark Wahlberg gives what I can only call the full Wahlberg as the principal hero, the rig’s chief electronics
Deepwater Horizon (12A) Verdict: True-life disaster movie
technician Mike Williams. Kurt Russell, exuding a kind of grizzled integrity, is his immediate boss, ‘Mr’ Jimmy Harrell. And Russell’s stepdaughter, Kate Hudson, plays Felicia, the obligatory fragrant wife back at home, chewing her fingernails as news emerges of a terrible rig fire.
Just as obligatory is a villain, eccentrically played here by John Malkovich, with an accent that veers in eight different directions at once. He is the BP executive Donald Vidrine, who, at least as the film tells it, disregarded safety in pursuit of profit.
I always think of Richard Chamberlain in The Towering Inferno as the prototype of the disaster-movie villain. Malkovich is this movie’s
Richard Chamberlain, who at one point uses the euphemism ‘London’ to imply corporate greed.
That was the point at which I winced, fully expecting a cut to an oak-panelled boardroom full of upper-class English smoothies, but mercifully Berg and his screenwriters resisted.
The friend I saw the film with did think that the BP logo might as well have been a swastika, but on the whole, the demonising of fat-cat Brits is trumped — or possibly Trumped — by the lionising of good ol’ American grit. A couple of shots of the Stars ’n’ Stripes, framed by billowing flames, might as well carry the caption ‘highly symbolic’.
Nevertheless, the chaos aboard the rig as the disaster unfolds — and the excessively unfortunate timing of Mr Jimmy’s shower — is powerfully and realistically evoked. It’s a genuinely exhilarating and at times moving film. Whether it should have been made is another matter.