Clint Eastwood's Shortest Directorial Work is Also His Most Padded

Rating: 4/10 (27 November 2016)

Clint Eastwood rarely makes a movie shorter than 2 hours in length. Even Blood Work (2002), one of his shortest movies (and perhaps his worst film as director), clocks in at 110 minutes. So it's especially notable that his 2016 film Sully is by far his shortest at just 96 minutes.
It's also insufferably padded to reach even that meager length.
Ostensibly, the story concerns the real life drama behind "The Miracle on The Hudson", a true life event from 2009 whereby airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger saved the lives of 155 passengers and crew when he successfully landed his plane on the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese and losing both engines shortly after takeoff. Tom Hanks plays the titular hero Sully well enough, with bleached white hair and mustache, but the key phrase of this paragraph is "real life drama", and in that the film is sorely lacking.
Oh, sure... the procedural scenes of the plane accident and its miraculous landing and subsequent rescue of all passengers and crew is real enough, if you can forgive the poor CGI. And if you like procedural drama (as I do), those scenes are pretty riveting as well. But Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki know that you already know that story, and they've deigned to focus the bulk of the movie on a purely fictional and wholly inaccurate NTSB investigation that never feels genuine, plausible or entertaining.
The central drama of the film therefore involves a ridiculous assertion that the investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board just have it out for poor pilot Sully and are determined to fault him for endangering the lives of everyone on board. The villains helming the investigation smirk and sneer their way through scene after implausible scene, but none of it really happened. It's all so distasteful and badly conceived. An early line in the film implies that they're under considerable pressure from the airline and insurance companies, but mostly their behavior is to be taken at face value, and it just doesn't work. And though this plot (the main plot, I'd like to reiterate) is tedious and unwelcome, Eastwood and Komarnicki offer a number of excruciating bad scenes to suggest that the NTSB may be right, including far too many scenes of Sully waking up from PTSD-induced nightmares and fantasies of the plane crashing into the city, as well as scenes where he questions his actions to his lap dog co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart).
But even this empty, manufactured main plot (and its many supporting scenes of Sully questioning his worth as a pilot) only pads the film so much. In order to hit the 90 minute mark, the filmmakers become mired in uninteresting minutiae about all manner of supporting characters. The audience is asked to endure countless scenes in which Sully speaks with his wife (played here by Laura Linney, in a totally wasted non-role of a character) by telephone. They talk about nothing even remotely interesting and nothing that propels the story or the drama. It's painful and dull and insulting. Unless your idea of riveting drama is two people talking on the phone about bills and house payments and how it sure would be nice if this investigation would be over already, then perhaps you'll enjoy Sully. But, I can assure you that's not my idea of good storytelling and I found the whole wife subplot unnecessary and distracting.
There are also a number of scenes involving passengers and hotel employees and regular New Yorkers, and they all get about as much to work with in terms of quality. There's the bartender (Michael Rapaport, again completely wasted) who tells Sully how he named a drink after him, and the makeup girl (Molly Bernard) who kisses Sully for her mom, and the passenger with a baby (Autumn Reeser) and the passenger who gets separated from his family (Sam Huntington) - But none of their stories are compelling because we either already know that everyone survives or we just don't care about such obvious padding in scenes that have little to do with the central story. They're the kinds of roles that would be cut out of most films because they drag the movie down, but in the case of Sully, they are given the unenviable task of simply killing time.
And don't get me started on the various flashbacks of Sully flying. (Here he is learning to fly as a boy! Now he's in the Air Force!)
Sully is a disappointment, to be sure, but Eastwood and Hanks try to make the best of the dreadful screenplay and almost make you think you're watching something important. And the bloated supporting cast of struggling or barely recognizable actors (that had to be employed in order to pad out the many, unnecessary characters) are actually mostly pretty good. Or, at least the ones who can hide their excitement at working in a scene opposite Tom Hanks or getting direction from Clint Eastwood are good - Some are worse at that than the rest, sadly.
As real life dramas go, this one falls way short, mostly due to the obvious padding that only serves to ruin the good stuff.
The real Chesley Sullenberger deserves better.