‘I got a problem with everybody…’
Sometimes, it’s genuinely impressive how such an incredible roster of talent can make something so mediocre. Out of the Furnace, Scott Cooper’s neo-noir crime thriller from 2013, features Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe AND Zoe Saldana, and yet, it’s a tedious, forgettable mess…
Russell (Bale) and Rodney Baze (Affleck) are brothers from the wrong side of the tracks in a declining steel town. We’ve seen these characters a hundred times before. They try their best but they keep getting drawn into the criminal underworld. Russell is level-headed and headstrong, while Rodney is unpredictable and still suffering the scars of his service in the Iraq War. Dafoe plays a crime lord, Harrelson plays a more dangerous crime lord… It’s all annoyingly predictable.
The problem here clearly isn’t the cast, but it might be the director. Cooper has made a career out of three-star movies such as Black Mass, Hostiles and The Pale Blue Eyes. He’s yet to improve upon Crazy Heart, his excellent directorial debut, and Deliver Me from Nowhere, his recent uninspiring Bruce Springsteen biopic, demonstrates that this is a director who simply doesn’t know how to get the best out of his actors (despite being an actor himself). This is doubly frustrating as Bale, one of his generation’s finest actors, seems to have hitched his wagon to this guy, having now appeared in three of his films. Maybe Cooper is putting something down that I’m failing to pick up, but I just don’t see the appeal in any of his work. Out of the Furnace is no different. It has a compelling visual style, and the cast do their best with what they’re given, but this is a film that has already completely fallen out of favour with audiences and that’s because it brings absolutely nothing new to the table.
I watched Out of the Furnace for the cast, but this is a film that never threatens to be greater than the sum of its considerable parts. What a waste.
