A Real Crash and Burn of a Film

Rating: 3/10 (10 November 2018)

I paid $6.50 to watch "Sully" in a theater on this drizzly day, and think I would have been better off spending nothing and standing out in the drizzle instead.
Sully came highly recommended, and most of the people in the theater seemed to enjoy it, but I found the simplified storyline unnecessarily manipulative and boring. Sully is a typical Clint Eastwood directed blockbuster that pits a purely heroic pilot (Tom Hanks) against the completely villainous investigators of the NTSB. Eastwood has again shown himself incapable of nuance, and unable to tell a story without lazily resorting to a binary narrative of absolute good and evil. Maybe American audiences crave simplistic black and white stories (as indicated by the box-office success of Sully), but I'd rather spend my time with complex stories and characters, even if the grand narrative is one of hero vs. villain.
I'm certain there is a good tale to be told about the ditching of the USAir flight. In this case it looks like Tom Hanks did the best he could with a weak script, but Mr. Eastwood's directing made sure that Sully wouldn't rise above the level of a made for TV Movie of the Week. Sully is simply not worthy of the big screen, or $6.50.