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THE FINEST HOURS Send This Review to a Friend
The sea rescue scenes in “The Finest Hours,” based on a famous U.S. Coast Guard feat in 1952 during a ranging storm, are powerfully presented and look awesome in 3-D Imax. But the first part of the film is devoted to a clichéd romance, later escalated to the boyfriend struggling at sea while the desperate woman on shore worries about the fate of her man.
The film, written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson and directed by Craig Gillespie, veers back and forth between the ocean perils and the waiting woman, with that annoying combination undercutting the visual and suspenseful strengths of the saga.
The perilous situation occurs off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts when an oil tanker, the Pendleton, is almost torn in half by the storm, and the first assistant engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) takes over and decides that running the ship aground is the only way the 30 sailors aboard might survive.
Meanwhile, Coast Guard Captain Bernie Webber (calmly portrayed by Chris Pine) is ordered to head a four-man, potentially suicidal rescue mission requiring his small Coast Guard boat to pass over a treacherous sand bar area to reach the stricken ship. He has just succumbed to the pressure by his girlfriend, Miriam, played earnestly by pretty Holiday Grainger, to promise to marry her. Will he survive to fulfill the commitment? Of course, even though the outcome is in the record books, we can expect that the answer in a Disney film must be yes. (At the end we are shown photographs of the real-life couple.)
The screenplay is based on the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman, and the adaptation manages to whip up suspense and admiration for the way in which the storm has been so vividly and convincingly depicted. It didn’t need the romance. A Disney Pictures release. Reviewed January 29, 2016.
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