The Finest Hours is an interesting look at a 1952 rescue attempt of an oil tanker by a small Coast Guard crew. Although interesting I also have to admit that it is also sanitized. This is most likely due to the fact that it was made by Disney. Disney has been pretty up front about releasing more mature PG-13 movies under the Disney name lately. If The Finest Hours had come out in the 90s it very well could have been released under the Disney’s Touchstone banner instead. I was hoping for the best going into this movie and I mostly came out of it satisfied.
The Finest Hours is about a Coast Guard rescue attempt after two oil tankers, the SS Fort Mercer and the SS Pendleton, are smashed in half off the coast of Cape Cod by a huge winter storm and fierce waves. Coast Guardsmen Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) is volunteered to lead a team of three other Coast Guardsmen to try and find the SS Pendleton that most of the other first responders do not know about because they are responding to the SS Fort Mercer miles away. Aboard the SS Pendleton the captain has died with the half of the oil tanker that didn’t make it and what is left is a crew of seaman lead by the unlikely leader Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) who is the ships engineer and not very well liked by the other men due to him staying to himself.
The acting in this movie is good and is what really makes the movie work for the most part. Chris Pine to me looked a lot younger in this role than he has in the Star Trek movies. I can’t say he is a great dramatic actor but I can say that Chris Pine gets the job done in all his roles and certainly gets the job done here in The Finest Hours. Casey Affleck as always also gives a decent performance although I can’t say it is his best. Although the performances are good I think the script lacks giving the characters more of a background. Affleck and Pine’s characters are fine for what they are, but I never really get why they are in the chosen professions that they are in. A lot of the secondary characters are also decent played by a lot of recognizable actors. Some of them though get sort of lost in the shuffle and it causes the actors playing them to just go through the motions for the most part.
Where The Finest Hours really succeeds are the action scenes. Pine’s character takes a 36-foot Coast Guard life boat to rescue the men on the SS Pendleton. The scenes showing that boat trying to get through the ferocious winter storm and crashing waves are spectacular. Late last year I saw the awful remake of a great movie called Point Break and in the remake they have a scene of crashing waves pushing around a little boat using CGI and it is horrendous looking. In The Finest Hours though the filmmakers actually manage to make the small Coast Guard life boat going through the water look stunning in every scene.
I also enjoyed the different things that the remaining crew on the SS Pendleton had to do to survive. It reminded me a lot of last year’s Black Sea which was a solid January release. Although The Finest Hours isn’t quite as good as Black Sea I think it is a solid January release this year. It lacks a bit of tension here and there and doesn’t quite do everything it can with the story and characters, but overall it gets the job done. Sure it comes off as kind of paint by numbers, but the filmmakers do a pretty good job telling the story of real life events that most people probably wouldn’t have known about without this film.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★½ (3½) out of ★★★★★(5)
