Usually with you have a one-two power punch combo like Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks you’d be hard-pressed to think an audience would be in store for anything but movie magic.
Not the case with, “Sully”.
While the role is perfectly tailored for Hanks – the classic American Everyman – who gives a typically excellent performance, the film falls a little flat at the end of the day.
Based on Chesley ‘Sully” Sullenberger’s autobiography, “Highest Duty”, the film transforms the events of Jan. 15, 2009 when Captain Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles (played by the consistently underappreciated Aaron Eckhart) safely landed Flight 1549 in New York City’s Hudson River after both engines were knocked out on their U.S. Airways jet when they flew into a flock of birds.
As anyone familiar with the real-life story knows, all 150 passengers and five crewmembers survived with few suffering injury.
What some people might not know is the aftermath, where Sully and Skiles were subject to an investigation by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for possible negligence, which could have cost them their jobs and pensions.
Director Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki try to insert some dramatic tension into the proceedings, but this is a story the audience knows right from the opening will have a happy ending.
Still, Eastwood films the doomed flight with a heightened sense of danger with Sully’s paranoid 9/11-esque vision of crashing his plane into a Manhattan skyscraper then the Hudson at the forefront. The director’s choice of focusing on the media blitz and distortion of events is spot on, until ending with one of the biggest ever cop-outs in a movie courtroom where the NTSB officials (Anna Gunn, Mike O’Malley and Jamey Sheridan) go against everything they’d be arguing in the film.
Hanks does a bang-up job playing the titular character as a reluctant hero, but it’s far from his best work.
However, his portrayal of Sully is one of a normal guy who takes a respectable and noble stance, which works more in reality than in a movie where after a while (even in a film only 96 minutes long) it gets a tad boring.
Eckhart is typically stellar with what he has to work with, but the always excellent Laura Linney is completely wasted as Sully’s withdrawn wife who seems to have marital issues with our protagonist that go completely unexplored.
Having said all this, “Sully” isn’t a bad film, it’s just a predictable one that doesn’t know what it wants or what it’s supposed to be.
For information on local screenings, visit www.cochranemoviehouse.com.
