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Triple 9: Mini-review

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Woody Harrleson

Woody Harrelson is one of many wasting their time and talent in Triple 9

C-In police lingo, a Code 999 means “Officer down – urgent help needed.” The makers of the new action thriller Triple 9 might well have sent out a Code 999 of their own. For, despite an excellent cast and two dazzling set pieces, Triple 9‘s script needed some urgent rewriting help that never arrived.

The movie starts with a bang as a highly trained crew of crooked cops and ex-military criminals led by Michael Atwood (Chiwetel Ejiofor) pull off an elaborate daylight bank robbery. As cover for an even more dangerous second robbery, the team decide to kill Chris Allen (Casey Affleck), the new partner of Marcus Belmont (Anthony Mackie), one of the crooked cops in the crew. However, Chris’s uncle, Jeffrey (Woody Harrelson) just happens to be the detective investigating the first robbery.

Director John Hillcoat has a cornucopia of acting talent at his disposal in Triple 9, including Kate Winslet as a Russian mobster’s wife calling the shots for the robbers and Aaron Paul and Norman Reedus as two more crew members. In addition, Hillcoat brilliantly stages both the bank robbery and a shootout at an apartment complex (shown in the clip below). These sequences bring to mind the bank robbery scene in Michael Mann‘s Heat, a film that Triple 9 screenwriter Matt Cook undoubtedly tried to emulate. However, Cook’s script is hopelessly muddled as he tries and repeatedly fails to depict the morally ambiguous nature of almost every character in the movie. Triple 9 simply has too many characters competing for too little screen time. Chiewetel Ejiofor is top billed, but in two hours, virtually the only thing the audience learns about him is that he has a son that the Russians are keeping away from him. The plot has the expected twists and double crosses, but the audience will probably be too weary from trying to keep up with the characters to pay much attention. With a script this lackluster and confusing, it’s no surprise that Woody Harrelson comes off best here, livening up nearly every scene with zingers and one-liners. When Harrelson is onscreen or the action is going down, Triple 9 comes alive, but otherwise, it’s a cinematic Code 10—off duty.
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The Finest Hours: Mini-review

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Chris Pine

Chris Pine on dry land

B-The mini-mini-review of The Finest Hours sounds like a children’s riddle. The movie is on solid ground when the action is out at sea, but it gets waterlogged quickly in the scenes on dry land. The reason that The Finest Hours is so bifurcated is no puzzle, just a cliché-laden screenplay with cardboard characters.

The Finest Hours recounts the true story of the 1952 rescue of some 30 crew members of the SS Pendleton, an oil tanker that split in two a short way off the coast of Massachusetts during a major winter storm. By the time the Pendleton foundered, most of the available Coast Guard personnel had already left their station to rescue survivors from another sinking tanker in the area. Another small rescue boat, captained by Bernie Webber (Chris Pine), headed to the Pendleton, while its crew, led by engineer  Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) struggled to keep the pumps going until help arrived,

The rescue of the Pendleton‘s crew is rightly considered one of the Coast Guard’s finest moments, and, for once, excellent CGI effects are actually necessary to convey the scope of what actually occurred. A 36-foot boat battling 50-foot waves before trying to pull alongside half of a 500-foot freighter has to be seen to be believed. The human element of The Finest Hours is far more of a mixed bag, though. Casey Affleck is fine as Ray in a subtle, low-key perfromance, as he assumes command and quiets the predictable cries of impending doom. However, the script saddles Bernie with a completely unnecessary backstory involving his hesitancy to marry his girlfriend Miriam (Holliday Grainger), who then shows up at the Coast Guard station to shrewishly browbeat Bernie’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) for sending her husband out on what could be a suicide mission. Not only are these events totally fictitious (Webber actually had been married for over a year when the rescue occurred, and his wife never showed up at the station that day), but they aren’t even good melodrama. Director Craig Gillespie should have trusted the inherent strength of his incredible but true story that had more than enough real drama. Grainger’s entire storyline, which includes a meet-cute prologue seemingly straight out of a Gene Kelly postwar musical, should have landed on the cutting room floor. The Finest Hours is fine enough without her. 
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