Grounded

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 2005)

Curiously anaemic biopic that works hard to deliver little. There's definite promise in the early scenes where the young Hughes comes across as a sleazeball with the nightclub waitress and you wonder how this particular shade of character will be reconciled with all the other shades still to be painted in. But then. . . there aren't any more. The script abandons any notion of complexity and instead drops into neutral, leaving all concerned to do their best with an acting vehicle that never once gets off the ground.
Scorsese is too canny a director not to know when things aren't working out, but there's real desperation here in the extended aircraft crash sequence, as blatant a case as ever there was of special effects being rushed in to enliven a movie that's lost its way as well as its pace.
Shame. It could, and should, have been so much, much better.