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How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★★★☆☆ 28 January 2014
This article is a review of OUT OF THE FURNACE. |
“Don’t be too proud to work for a living,” Russell Baze (Christian Bale) to brother Rodney Baze Jr. (Casey Affleck)
OUT OF THE FURNACE is a gripping mess of a movie. It oozes classiness. The cast is a wealth of names: Bale, Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe and Sam Shepard. Behind the camera is Scott Cooper (CRAZY HEART) and producers Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott. It’s like Hollywood’s golden children have had a sleepover and decided to make a movie together; everything though thrown into the melting pot for a resulting mix of frequent tastiness but overall stodginess.
OUT OF THE FURNACE is a gripping mess of a movie. It oozes classiness. The cast is a wealth of names: Bale, Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe and Sam Shepard. Behind the camera is Scott Cooper (CRAZY HEART) and producers Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott. It’s like Hollywood’s golden children have had a sleepover and decided to make a movie together; everything though thrown into the melting pot for a resulting mix of frequent tastiness but overall stodginess.
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Opening on Harrelson’s earring-wearing, awkwardly monikered nutter, Harlan DeGroat, drunkenly losing it at a drive-in cinema on a patron, the brutal initiation is heavy-handed (ahem, pardon the pun) in establishing Harlan’s modus operandi. Harrelson goes beyond his ponderous amorality in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and his crooked cop meltdown in RAMPART. The next scene has Bale’s Russell working at the steel mill, the employment lifeblood of the community. Quickly established as conscientious and attentive – playfully romancing girlfriend Lena Taylor (Saldana), keeping an eye on gambling addict soldier brother Rodney (Affleck) and checking in on his dying father. Almost saintly, his life unravels after one mistake. Wanting to pay off some of Rodney’s gambling debt to local hoodlum John Petty (Dafoe), he drinks and drives home, only to collide into a car killing the passengers. Factory, check. Vehicular manslaughter, check. Bale, check. So far so THE MACHINIST. He doesn’t hit and run, and faces the consequences – namely jail and some denizens who don’t take a shine to him. Meanwhile Rodney, through the stop-loss military initiative, is shipped back to Iraq for his fourth tour, suffering obvious post-traumatic distress. On leaving prison, Russell’s world is a much sadder place.
See what one means? A fusion of working class dwindling options, incarceration mistreatment, post-war psychological distress; and OUT OF THE FURNACE (talk about glaring title) hasn’t even got into second gear yet. Eschewing social realist commentary, the filmmakers think it’s a good idea to take the narrative to illegal boxing and then genre vigilante revenge territory. The last third could be typical Jason Statham hokum, stuff one normally finds to be a guilty pleasure, but funnelled through this ensemble is a crying shame. The creaking plot mechanics waste them. Matthew McConaughey’s MUD played in genre far more satisfyingly. (Both have a rifle-wielding Sam Shepard too.)
There might be a commentary on capitalism; though like gold panhandlers, you’ll have to do much sifting to find a coherent allegory. Handsome production values and committed charismatic acting don’t quite make up for dishevelled storytelling.
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