Deepwater Horizon

Year: 2016
Genre: Drama
Directed: Peter Berg
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Gina Rodriguez, John Malkovich, Dylan O'Brien, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee, Henry Frost, Jeremy Sande, Brad Leland, Joe Chrest, Douglas M. Griffin, David Maldonado
Production: Summit Entertainment

Call the month of September gear shift month for big-budget Hollywood. Somewhere just before school begins and the auspicious start of award season, larger outfits worth their salt release otherwise decent films that don't quite fit neatly into the defined high and low tides of Blockbuster season and Oscar-bait season respectively. Sometimes that's a good thing, giving us underappreciated gems like Pawn Sacrifice (2015) or out-of-nowhere emotional powerhouses like Room (2015).

This month, the movie Gods have blessed us with not one, but two nuts-and-bolts features, based on true, ripped from the headlines stories existing as examples of American selflessness and elbow-grease, but whose movie adaptations prove underwhelming. The first was Sully (2016); now the second is Deepwater Horizon.

In the wee hours of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a semi-submersible offshore drilling rig exploded 40 miles off the southwest coast of Louisiana. After the initial catastrophe, 126 workers found themselves trapped aboard the rig which was quickly consumed by a raging fire that lasted more than 24 hours. The film centers on the stories of the 126 crew members and their challenges to escape danger in the explosion's immediate aftermath.

These stories include that of Chief Electrician Mike Williams (Wahlberg). The beginning of the film portrays him as a blue-collar every-man whose expertise and caution pegs him as one of the main flies in the ointment to impatient company men. When he first arrives on the Deepwater, he and rig foreman Mr. Jimmy (Russell) appropriately ream BP overseers for ignoring (among other things) a leaky blowout preventer, an untested wellhead and, most egregiously calling back the exploration crew before they could test out their concrete job.

If that all sounds too technical don't worry, director Peter Berg seemingly unaware that audiences can pick up on context clues, plugs in handy title cards to help explain the intricacies of drilling for oil on the open seas. Information that cannot be conveyed via tile card is helpfully scribbled on chalkboard by main BP lackey Donald Vidrine (Malkovich) and surmised by Russell's "working-man knows best" proclamations. This is despite knowing full-well, the Deepwater's crew presumably knows how to do their job.

In fairness to Mr. Berg, the technical abilities of an oil rig crew is a pretty insulated set of engineering expertise. A profession whose lingo doesn't quite lend itself to an audience like a writer or lawyer or airline pilot does. It's even more of a wonder the movie is as harrowing as it is when you consider Berg's recent pivot from being a poor man's Michael Bay to a pretty convincing mimic of Paul Greengrass. Only the arrival of Patriots Day (2016) will confirm if that transformation is complete but as of now his mimicry remains sorely undercooked.

Part of the problem is an inability to marry subject with scale. Berg likes to play it tight with his camera, focusing on frenzied in-frame movements, microcosmic gear-churning and bloodied wounds instead of the grandeur of a gigantic rig lighting up like Burning Man. Despite there being a concerted attempt to explore every nook and cranny of the Deepwater, when s*** really hits the fan, you're never quite sure where you are or where the characters are in relation to one another.

Seriously, just look at that mustache!

What's worse, there's also no time for character in Deepwater Horizon. There's a sense of peril but every time a poor soul gets engulfed by flames, we're never clear on who exactly is in peril, or why we should care. Only Russell and Wahlberg get the chance to emerge from the grime and grease as recognizable faces. Russell in particular is pegged early by virtue of a pretty nice face caterpillar; that and a performance that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of gruff and grizzle we truly need.

As our default protagonist, Mark Wahlberg is given every chance to display his personal brand of everyman heroics. He's basically played the exact same character in Berg's much better Lone Survivor (2013), where he was able to mix aspects of his natural masculinity with his inner Tony Robbins. Here however he's sabotaged by an innocuous presence, slurred speech and indecipherable jargon. I'm sure in a film script less tethered by the limitations of docudrama realism, he could have made it work. Unfortunately oil rig electrician is simply another STEM field job Markie Mark just isn't suited for.

I can science, I have scienced before...

We all guessed The Perfect Storm.

Despite it's many faults however, Deepwater Horizon is an okay movie made just a smidgen more relevant by its real-life story and the fact that it's September and there's not all that much out at the moment. Watch it, enjoy it, and realize that five years from now you'll probably get a question about it at your local tavern's trivia night and get it wrong.

Final Grade: C