Pointless Documentary with lots of explosions

Rating: 4/10 (23 December 2017)

A movie that focuses on a single binary event- the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The film avoids delving into the political, social, or ecological ramifications of the disaster and its aftermath. This is a major disappointment for me. The directors could have made so much more of this movie.
The film stars Mark Walhberg as a technician who works on the Deepwater Horizon. Wahlberg's character has no special skills that are apparent or ever explained. He has no interesting dialogue. He sits around surfing the web and chatting with his wife half of the movie. When things go south, he suddenly morphs into a super hero with super human skills who saves lives. But I digress. Wahlberg's role in Deepwater Horizon is virtually identical to "The Perfect Storm". He has a Suzy-homemaker wife played by Kate Hudson who sits at home watching soap operas all day worrying about him while Wahlberg is out at sea trying to earn a paycheck for his family. It was like they carbon-copied his character from "The Perfect Storm", but changed the scenery to an oil rig.
Other stars include Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, and Gina Rodriguez. Russell is the good-guy rig supervisor who the workers love. He is at odds with Malkovich, a BP executive, who only cares about corporate profits at the expense of safety and the environment. The most passionate scene of the movie involves a heated exchange between Russell and Malkovich, but this exchange is done awkwardly. It is not classic Kurt Russell. Both Russell and Malkovich have bizarre accents that are difficult to understand. Russell tries to speak with a Southern accent and Malkovich uses a New Orleans Creole accept. Both work poorly. It is nearly impossible to understand what they are saying, but you get the gist of their dispute.
Gina Rodriguez's character is also a tech of some sort. There's really not much else to say on her. She is boring like Wahlberg. The other characters in the movie are background props. They are cannon-fodder. The characters do all sorts of tests that are never explained to the audience. You have no idea what is going on and it is never explained what caused the failure.
The action scenes as the disaster begins are well done. Lots of blood, shrapnel, etc. There is a scene that looks like it was stolen right out of the movie "Titanic" where a worker is blown off the side of the rig into the sea and hits a propeller of some sort before bouncing off to his death.
Overall, the movie is an easy paycheck for Wahlberg and Russell. They are asked to do very little as the film focuses more on explosions. With a letter effort, the writers could have added some scenes in the beginning and the end about the politics and environmental consequences.