If you like Eddie Vedder songs, depressing photography of abandoned steel towns, and really depressing characters getting beaten down by unfortunate circumstances, well…you’ll still probably leave this movie a little bummed out.
It’s marketed as a downbeat, realistic rescue film where Christian Bale’s ex-con has to go up into the mountains between Pennsylvania and New Jersey to save his bare-knuckle fighting/army-vet brother (Casey Affleck) from a backwoods crime boss (Woody Harrelson), with Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, Sam Shepard, and Zoe Saldana there to look sadly on at the events. Well, the film is a lot more meandering than that, and features revenge more than rescue. But even then it’s a strange, elliptical sort of revenge where nobody seems to care much if they get it.
What Works: Christian Bale is soulful and heartbreaking in the lead role. You feel profoundly bad for his character (who loses close to everything over an out-of-nowhere drunk-driving incident that’s not really his fault) and that sense of regret is crucial to a movie that seems to be wallowing in it so much. Also, I could have sworn the trailers were set in the rural South, so it’s interesting to see that parts of New Jersey (NYC folk call them “Hill People”) look a hell of a lot like the worst parts of Alabama. If the film had shined a light on that culture a little bit more, it could have worked up something interesting.
What Doesn’t Work: The movie is only two hours long but feels like three. I credit this to the ramshackle narrative that is more interested in paying lip-service to “big ideas” than in truly exploring them. Sure, it tries its best to hit on all the rural America buzz issues (heroic soldiers having a hard time readjusting to civilian life, bad guys dealing meth, “the mill shutting down,”), but it never gels into a compelling verisimilitude. At its core, there’s something naggingly inauthentic about this movie and that’s a huge problem, since so much of it seems designed more as an indie docudrama than a movie to engage audiences during a busy holiday moviegoing season. I guess we’re supposed to be impressed by A-list talent dressing down to play “rurals,” but it never comes off as anything but that. Also, Harrelson’s villain really lacked specificity and we’re never sure just why he’s so pissed off all the time except that the script needs him to be.
I’ll also admit to feeling a little duped by the advertising. I was actually really looking forward to this, but had an “uh-oh” moment during the very first scene when Harrelson gets into a completely forgettable and predictable fight just to establish what a badass he is. Then they kept piling up when I discovered that Saldana’s character would be the ex-girlfriend of Bale’s character and she’s really in an unlikely relationship with Forest Whittaker since Bale’s mostly-unjust imprisonment. Should we really invest that much in a hero who seems to have already lost everything? And even if we should, does the movie make that case? Not really to both answers.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There could be a half-interesting movie right underneath the surface, but I feel like it doesn’t have Bale going to jail (a working class hero’s journey through the underworld could be better than an ex-con’s) since his incarceration doesn’t add much to the overall story, it doesn’t have Harrelson’s villain being so generic, and the majority of it (not merely SOME of it) involves Bale’s dangerous quest through “hill town” Jersey. I would love to see a more fleshed-out, underworld tour of this scuzzy landscape that’s mostly used for landfills.