You let me worry about who’s the nasty son-of-a-bitch.

Out of the Furnace

(2013)

Scott Cooper’s sophomore film is a handsomely mounted, well-performed revenge drama with pretensions of being about “stuff”. You know, meaty stuff, like man’s propensity for violence and the disintegration of local economies. As good as it is in moments – a scene here or there – it fails to resonate on a broader level. As if merely invoking thematic content and having it stretch in bloated fashion across the Pennsylvania landscape, accompanied by Pearl Jam, is enough. It isn’t and the result is distinctly underwhelming.

Cooper wrote the screenplay with Brad Ingelsby, and he takes in a range of tropes, all of them over-familiar. Christian Bale is Russell Baze, a blue-collar steel worker who serves a stretch for vehicular homicide (he was over the limit at the wheel). While he is inside his Iraq veteran younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) has resorted to bareknuckle boxing, in consort with John Petty (Willem Dafoe) a loan shark and wheeler-dealer. The two of them go missing after Rodney persuades Petty to get him a fight in New Jersey. This is Deliverance territory, where even the police fear to tread, which leads Russell to make his own justice.

We’ve seen all this before, but rarely with quite such sombre and self-important posturing. Yet none of it feels quite right. Elements are plucked out of the air because they sound dramatic, rather than because they add up. It’s an easy dramatic device to feature an unstable soldier in a movie, one who can’t handle the things he saw. And it’s an even easier one to have a psychotic backwater loon who’ll kill you as soon as give the time of day. Affleck, master of mumblecore delivery, gives it his best shot but he’s miscast as a super bruiser. We just don’t believe he’s that tough. In contrast, Woody Harrelson steals the picture as Harlan DeGroat, the crazy drug dealer who force-feeds his date a hotdog during the opening drive-in scene. We’ve seen Harrelson do crazy-eyed lunacy before, but here he manages to out-intimidate himself. It’s a rivetting performance and the picture only really kicks into gear when he’s around.

Furnace is littered with good actors in small, unrewarding roles. Dafoe is ever watchable. Forrest Whitaker must have wanted to work with Cooper badly, as he hardly needed to show up for the non-plum part of the local police chief. Likewise Zoe Saldana as Russell’s ex. Then there’s the great Sam Shepard as the Russells’ Uncle Gerald. Bale is typically sincere and determined, but there really isn’t much to get worked up about in Russell. He’s well-meaning (paying off his brother’s debts), makes mistakes (getting over-the-limit, not thinking through the consequences of luring DeGroat into his trap), but is stoically dull.

Like Killing them Softly, the film picks up at Obama’s first election, although this appears only as a means to gauge how long Russell is in stir for (that said, I’m not clear if this is set mainly in the present day; I don’t think we find out how long he’s incarcerated). Cooper seems to want to make all sorts of commentaries, but cant disguise how this breaks down into a simple revenge thriller with some fairly unlikely developments along the way. He makes heavy weather of certain sequences too. The intercutting between Russell and Gerald going hunting (invoking The Deer Hunter) and Rodney preparing for his fight is excruciating and banal. There’s the occasional inspired moment – a SWAT team approaching through a quiet field – but they are few and far between. Whatever themes Cooper is aiming for, he misses. There’s no discernable debate on the rights and wrongs of Russell’s violence path, or no more than in your average thriller.

Indeed, Furnace takes its merry time to reach a conclusion, and one can’t help but wonder what it was all in aid of. Cooper is keen on verisimilitude in performance and location, but his plotting actively works against this. It is neither weighty not insightful, and some elements, such as the PTSD, are so obvious as to be near glib. Cooper’s languorous filmmaking style suited Crazy Heart, but here he comes unstuck. Out of the Furnace is neither fish nor fowl, not smart enough to reach for some sort of hallowed Winter’s Bone status and not nearly hokum enough to have a good time with its revenge plot (Harrelson at least knows he is in the latter movie). This doesn’t bode well for Cooper’s next, Black Mass with Johnny Deep Whitey Bulger. This is one of those movies few will remember; neither especially good nor bad, it is only the casting that sustains interest. Still, if you have a rep as an actor’s director (Cooper is also an a thesp) you’ll probably attract names no matter how mediocre the results are.

**1/2

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

Farewell, dear shithead, farewell.

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) (SPOILERS) I saw Highlander II: The Quickening at the cinema. Yes, I actually paid money to see one of the worst mainstream sequels ever on the big screen. I didn’t bother investigating the Director’s Cut until now, since the movie struck me as entirely unsalvageable. I was sufficiently disenchanted with all things Highlander that I skipped the TV series and slipshod sequels, eventually catching Christopher Lambert’s last appearance as Connor MacLeod in Highlander: End Game by accident rather than design. But Highlander II ’s on YouTube , and the quality is decent, so maybe the Director’s Cut improve matters and is worth a reappraisal? Not really. It’s still a fundamentally, mystifyingly botched retcon enabling the further adventures of MacLeod, just not quite as transparently shredded in the editing room.

A subterranean Loch Ness Monster?

Doctor Who The Silurians No, I’m not going to refer to The Silurians as Doctor Who and the Silurians . I’m going to refer to it as Doctor Who and the Eocenes . The Silurians plays a blinder. Because both this and Inferno know the secret of an extended – some might say overlong – story is to keep the plot moving, they barely drag at all and are consequently much fleeter of foot than many a four parter. Unlike Malcolm Hulke’s sequel The Sea Devils , The Silurians has more than enough plot and deals it out judiciously (the plague, when it comes, kicks the story up a gear at the precarious burn-out stage of a typical four-plus parter). What’s most notable, though, is how engaging those first four episodes are, building the story slowly but absorbingly and with persuasive confidence.

Suspicions of destiny. We all have them. A deep, wordless knowledge that our time has come.

Damien: Omen II (1978) (SPOILERS) There’s an undercurrent of unfulfilled potential with the Omen series, an opportunity to explore the machinations of the Antichrist and his minions largely ignored in favour of Final Destination deaths every twenty minutes or so. Of the exploration there is, however, the better part is found in Damien: Omen II , where we’re privy to the parallel efforts of a twelve or thirteen-year-old Damien at military school and those of Thorn Industries. The natural home of the diabolical is, after all, big business. Consequently, while this sequel is much less slick than the original, it is also more engaging dramatically.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog