Not Bad for a January Release

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2016)

The Finest Hours is one of those unfortunate titles that is forgotten as soon as you hear it. Whenever someone asked me what I was going to watch, all I could say was it was the Coast Guard movie. This is no reflection on the story but more a reflection on Disney's quixotic handling of this mid-January release. Movie after movie this year and last featured a trailer of The Finest Hours. Casey Affleck heroically keeps half a ship afloat while Chris Pine utters the manta "Coast Guard says you gotta go out, they don't tell you you gotta come back" in a thick Bostonian brogue.
Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber, a Coast Guard crewman who defines his decisions on the rule book as if it were a crutch. He even insists that before he marry his sweetheart Miriam (Grainger), he ask his superior officer as per Coast Guard regulation (though really just a formality). As a large winter storm approaches his corner of Cape Cod, not one but two oil tankers miles off the coast are split in half by the waves. The SS Mercer was able to send out a distress call and tie up Coast Guard resources while the SS Pendleton remained nearly invisible save a radar blip. Ship Engineer of the Pendleton Ray Sybert (Affleck) makes a desperate gambit to save the crew by constructing a rudder and running the aft of the ship on a shoal to slow them from sinking just long enough to get noticed and rescued.
The concept for a movie of this kind would sound ridiculous if it weren't true. In 1952, two tankers were indeed split in half and after the main crew left Chatham Station for one, a second crew was alerted to the Pendleton and braved the dangerous coastal banks to reach them in a tiny CG36500 lifeboat. The script based on a novel by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias is so old-fashioned, it immediately brings to mind the sea adventures in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951) or Sea Wife (1957). What sets The Finest Hours apart are the modernized special-effects and Craig Gillispie's dynamic direction.
The Finest Hours is far from perfect. The movie takes it's time to develop the relationship between Webber and heartthrob Miriam who does very little but delve into histrionics. It's a shame too because Grainger is an absolute vision who typifies the 1950's model of beauty and womanhood. Every scene she was in was certainly distracting from the story but for once I didn't much care. There's also something clearly wrong with the station's Commander Daniel Cluff (Bana). It's never clear how the audience should feel; is he closer to the vein of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (1954) or is he just an outsider trying to do his best given the situation? Also there's Disney's insistence that 3D is the way to go; yeah not so much. This is a movie whose main set-piece is a nocturnal nautical rescue thus wearing 3D glasses makes everything too dark to appreciate.
The scenes involving the Coast Guard lifeboat trudging through open ocean are the most riveting, barely surpassing the Pendleton's attempts to run aground via game of telephone. Throughout the movie people spout a torrent of nautical terms which appeared to go over the heads of audience members, yet what was clear were the stakes and the results of such a daring rescue. People will no doubt compare this film with The Perfect Storm (2000) which apart from it also taking place in the Northeastern United States, only makes sense as far as critical reaction.
I for one enjoyed this film, which is competently made, has some show-stopping, hair-raising scenes of seafaring mayhem and had some great low-key performances by Pine, Affleck and Grainger. Disney definitely crippled this film by giving it an instantly forgettable title and shoving 3D and IMAX 3D in our faces. It's a real shame too because the added disadvantage of having a January release and lukewarm reviews by critics all but guarantees this story will ever get the audience it deserves.