Shallowwater Horizon

Rating: 6/10 (28 May 2017)

Director Peter Berg gives us the story of the greatest oil spill in American history. He succeeds in delivering all the damage, but fails to showcase the impact.
On the grounds of drama, A movie like Deepwater Horizon will only strike oil if it is constructed as a drama about human beings, rather than a two hour treatment of a Wikipedia article. It's not a bad movie, but it has no soul. Something is missing.
Deepwater horizon feels like a two act structure for a story that warrants three acts. There is a distinctive beginning, a middle and then it's just ... over.
In the first part, we meet our main character (Wahlberg), his family and his co-workers. He hops a company chopper for a short flight to the Gulf of Mexico, and onto a doomed oil rig. It is there that we meet the unfavourable oil executive (Malcovich) who orders drilling to proceed after conducting a drilling pressure test that yields unsafe results. The teams starts drilling, and then mother nature fights back; flames go up.
While the real person was in fact charged with criminal inelegance, Deepwater Horizon relies on our knowledge of the outcome to make Malkovich seem like the kind corporate 'bad guy'; that Hollywood loves to hate. To make matters worse, John Malkovich gives a lousy performance with an accent so phony and untraceable that you'd think he came from a planet in the Star Trek universe. As for Mark Wahlberg, for the most part he is playing himself, but in fairness the script doesn't give him much.
Once the oil rig starts to go up, Deepwater Horizon succeeds in conjuring up some peril, but the camera work and lighting are highly disorienting, so after a while these scenes get tiresome.
There is a brief moment near the end of the movie that is memorable because it gives a hint of what is missing. A bruised and battered Wahlberg gets out of a car, squeezes through the press and in to a building where he is met by a man who asks him what happened to his son. When he doesn't get the answer he wants, he attempts to man handle Wahlberg. What Deepwater Horizon needs is a sense of emotion impact from the turmoil, because you are left wondering how the survivors repaired their lives. another half hour of material would have helped with this. the fact that the movie denies us this renders all the family introduction scenes in act one a complete waste of time.
There is more to this story than Peter Berg is able to deliver.