The Baddest Melodrama...

Rating: 5/10 (14 May 2016)

So, when a movie proudly proclaims "Based upon a true story" I have learned over the years to expect one of two things.
Either, it will take a real story, butcher it mercilessly but somehow still manage to make an entertaining film. Or, it will take a real story, butcher it mercilessly and then dare you to find fault with it because it is "based on a true story".
The Finest Hours is in the latter camp, sadly. The story of a brave sea rescue sounds just dandy in synopsis form, but the realisation of that rescue just ended being badly executed.
The first problem is the utterly unnecessary "love-interest" story tacked on to the movie. If you completely removed the Miriam character from the movie we would have a simple one hour thirty movie about a rescue at sea. But no, because of the "Scriptwriter 101" Bible, we have this romantic subplot badly shoehorned into the movie. And it is bad, trust me. Miriam's character comes across as horribly needy and controlling - in short, an unlikable character - and serves no useful purpose to the film's main story, except as a means to break up the sea scenes. Additionally, her character is entirely at odds with the time she is in. Jarringly so, in fact. But Disney, I guess, couldn't have a hero without having the obligatory "woman waiting for him to return" on shore plot.
Beyond that, when we finally get to the rescue, I expected some sort of crazy maneuvering by the coast guard ship, or some clever way to get the men from the stricken tanker onto the rescue boat.
But no, apparently basing a movie on a real life story and mucking it up a lot didn't include the notion of making this pivotal sequence interesting. So instead of something clever, we are treated to men climbing down a ladder and jumping either into the sea, or directly onto the lifeboat.
There is some good in the film. Pretty much any of the scenes aboard the tanker are nicely done and far more interesting than watching the antics of either Chris Pine (who here acts as woodenly as his name), or his pushy, control-freak of a girlfriend.
The tanker crew's struggle shows where all of the imagination in this script was. In fact, if the movie had been told primarily from their perspective with the coast guard crew as a secondary plot, and little miss annoying nowhere to be seen, then the movie would have been far more satisfying.
As it is, however, the film is somewhat dull and heavily weighted down by its own suffocating melodrama. Far too cloying.
SUMMARY: Horrible romantic subplot, dull rescue scenes and entirely too much melodrama to make this one worthwhile. Characters that all seem to be in various stages of depression. Perfect Storm, this ain't!