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‘The Finest Hours’ is visually stunning, emotionally lacking

“The Finest Hours,” out Friday, is billed as the true story of “the most daring rescue mission in U.S. Coast Guard history,” in which a four-man crew ventured out into a very bad storm in a very small boat to rescue the crew of the sinking oil tanker the SS Pendleton.

It’s also the story of the men aboard the Pendleton, who managed to keep their literally-torn-in-two ship afloat long enough to be rescued.

And the story of Bernie Webber (Chris Pine), the heroic leader of the rescue mission, and his budding romance with his future wife.

Overall, “The Finest Hours,” based on Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias’s book of the same name, tries to do too much in its just under two hours, with the end result being a movie that is intense and visually exciting but emotionally kind of flat.

In bits and pieces, we learn all about Bernie: how he had earlier been on a rescue mission that failed; how he doesn’t hesitate when assigned the risky Pendleton rescue; how he and Miriam (Holliday Grainger) fall in love and end up engaged after just three months.

Almost everyone else, however, is disappointingly underdeveloped. The Pendleton crew is led by Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck), who has the smarts needed to maneuver the foundering ship and steps up to take charge after the captain is lost, but the other men are loosely drawn archetypes—the rebel, the cheerful cook, the wise older guy. The fact that 33 men are in peril is enough to give the rescue mission weight; sketching in their identities doesn’t add too much, and you almost wonder why the filmmakers bothered.

“The Finest Hours” does successfully keep you on the edge of your seat, which, thankfully, it doesn’t do by adding any unnecessary punches; when people die or get hurt, for example, you don’t see any gore.

Instead, it crafts intensity with visuals that are 100 percent stunning. If you want to see this movie at all, you must see it in a theater, in all its big-screen 3-D glory, so you can fully appreciate the wide shots of the raging sea and the disconcerting sight of a boat ripped cleanly in two, which takes your breath away the first time you see it and never gets any less powerful. The scene in which Bernie and his crew attempt to pass the Chatham Bar, an unpredictable and scary patch of ocean, could double as an advertisement for pro surfing, taking the camera into waves and under waves and even through the closing tunnel of a cresting wave.

And though Carter Burwell’s beautiful score could fairly be called a little intrusive, just this once, that’s OK. There are no calm waters in the film, so if you’re not trained in reading waves, it might seem like everyone’s doomed the whole time, but you can look to the music for a narrative guide, growing intense when they’re in danger, calmer when you can breathe easy.

To reach its full emotional potential, “The Finest Hours” could have benefited from either tacking on an extra 20 minutes to develop each of its plotlines more fully or narrowing its focus and cutting a few of them out. But as it stands, it’s a perfectly good, exciting movie about what was unquestionably a heroic rescue, and that’s enough.

If you want to see it, see it in theaters; otherwise skippable. 2.5 stars.

@gauxmargaux | mhenquinet@redeyechicago.com

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