Polished and competent but nothing more

Rating: 4/10 (18 April 2017)

Clint Eastwood is such a conservative director. This film is extremely competent, the storytelling is very secure, but it is totally lacking in anything more than that.
This is definitely not a film that sets you thinking the day after about the scenes, realising 24 hours after seeing the film something new about it, this film is the absolute reverse of that.
Although you will not get bored watching this film you will have forgotten all about it thirty minutes after it is over and you will not ever think about it again.
The facts of the story are mostly true in this, but one aspect of the story is exaggerated in order to create more drama. To me this illustrates the lack of imagination of the director. It is clear that Eastwood could only conceive of the film with a strong dramatic tension at its centre to maintain the viewer's interest. It is true that this works but when you find out that this strong dramatic tension wasn't anything like as great in real life, the only thing the film had is undone.
Eastwood does show us events out of chronological order and the storytelling is always completely solid and that is an achievement. Hanks's Sully is totally convincing. Very good performances are everywhere in this film. Unfortunately the film has nothing to offer the viewer outside this competency.
I think Clint Eastwood should not have built this film around that exaggerated dramatic tension and instead done a thoughtful film about the USA, about society in the US, about heroes and how they could so easily be undone about so much else. We could have had a film that sent the audience home with food for thought, but what we get instead is a competently told film with very little imagination.