The Finest Hours **½ (2016, Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Holliday Grainger, Eric Bana, Ben Foster) – Movie Review

In a lavish, painstaking production, Walt Disney Pictures remember and celebrate the heroic story of a daring, against-all-odds rescue attempt by the US Coast Guard after two oil tankers are destroyed during a blizzard in February 1952 off the coast of Cape Cod.

Chris Pine stars as real-life hero Bernie Webber, who sets out with three other members of the Chatham Massachusetts Coast Guard in a tiny lifeboat in a huge storm to try to rescue the 32 sailors trapped aboard the rapidly-sinking Pendleton oil tanker off the coast of Cape Cod. It has split in two and the man desperately cling to lie on the remaining half tanker.

Webber loses his compass and sails by instinct, survives the finds the freezing temperatures and 70-foot waves and somehow finds the men still alive. His boat will take 20, 22 tops, but he decides to try to save everyone: we all live or we all die, right? Even if the boat could hold all the men, he’s still got no compass too get anyone back t dry land.

Visually, and in IMAX 3D, director Craig Gillespie (Million Dollar Arm) does a grand job of putting you in the zone with brilliant sea disaster action scenes realised in astonishingly realistic-looking CGI visual effects. And the blizzard-covered Massachusetts filming looks superb, a 1950s winter picture postcard come to vibrant life.

Dramatically things are much weaker. The always welcome Pine and Casey Affleck (cast against type as the Pendleton’s heroic leader) give fair performances, but thanks to weaknesses in the script both in dialogue, plot exposition and characterisation, they can’t disguise their an uphill struggle to etch memorable characters on the screen. 

It’s warm and well meaning, but far too much time is spent at the start on Webber’s sappy romance with Miriam (Holliday Grainger and during the rescue drama on her long anguished watch and wait. Do we really need to start in a prolonged 1951 prologue to find out how Bernie and Miriam met on a double date?

Later, in the main story, for all Miriam’s rushing around in snow and challenging the gruff man in charge at the Coast Guard station, Daniel Cluff (Eric Bana), little in the way of dramatic or emotional sparks come of this. It’s just shown as a situation, not a developing drama. Her fiancé has gone off on a crazy mission and there’s nothing she can do. Just sit and pine for Pine. That’s it, we get it. So get on with the rescue action!

At least Grainger and Bana make themselves felt on the audience. Ben Foster, Beau Knapp and the rest of the cast make little impression in insufficiently developed roles, frustrating for such good actors, as as well as for the audience. What’s the point of employing Foster and giving him nothing to do expect look creepy?

This is an old-fashioned man’s man sea-faring rescue movie and no modern trimmings can change that or improve on it. Its old-fashioned nature makes it a good fit for Disney, who want to celebrate courage and goodness. It’s a shame then that the movie isn’t more dramatically impactful. They mistakenly try to add impact by covering even the most dramatic moments in the movie with Carter Burwell’s intrusive score. When we finally get to the high-impact scenes, full of tempestuous natural storm and sea sounds, why couldn’t they trust the drama and make the music stop!

Poignantly, the movie’s end titles offer period pictures real-life people from the Boston Globe etc. They are quite haunting and also show just what a good job they’ve made of the look of the movie.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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