Review: "Crisis"

Writer/director Nicholas Jarecki had the idea to make his drama “Crisis” about the opioid epidemic as three parallel storylines. It’s not a new concept, but it can be an effective one when woven together artfully. Instead, the movie feels like three different tales rather than a gripping whole.

Individually, the pieces work. But two of them only intersect very late in the story and the third one… never does.

Armie Hammer plays Jake Kelly, a gruff, hard-charging DEA agent on the verge of a huge bust after spending a year infiltrating himself into the pill-mill trade. Evangeline Lilly is Claire Reimann, a suburban mom distraught over her teenage son’s death from overdose who decides to take matters into her own hands. Gary Oldman plays Tyrone Power, a scientist who’s been signing off on the big pharma’s studies in exchange for funding but undergoes an attack of conscience.

All three of these have enough narrative momentum, not to mention compelling performances, to merit an entire feature film. Together they are less than the sum of their parts.

It’s part cops-and-robbers, part revenge cycle and part corporate intrigue. I’m guessing the notion was to take a look at the opioid crisis from a variety of angles, but we actually see very little of the end effects on the users. Jake’s sister (Lily-Rose Depp) is an addict, which works to stoke his passions, but she only gets a couple of substantive scenes.

Tyrone is a chemistry professor at a small college that relies upon donations from a huge pharmaceutical company to fund his research, with Luke Evans playing the heavy. They believe they’ve stumbled upon a new form of painkiller that isn’t addictive, which will revolutionize the use of opioids -- not to mention rake in billions. But some lab technicians discover that the drug, Klaralon, is killing off their mice test subjects and needs to be pulled for more study.

He decides to go up against the big powers -- including his friend, the college president played by Greg Kinnear -- and progressively gets chewed up.

Claire insists that her son was not actually a drug user, and with a little digging and the help of a private investigator, she believes he was actually murdered rather than overdosed. She travels to Canada to look into the big pill operation behind it, which has recently moved into the even more deadly trade of fentanyl. It’s mentioned, but only lightly explored, that she used to be a user herself.

Meanwhile, Jake has set up his own front clinics where shady doctors dispense prescriptions to dangerous narcotics like candy (they hire homeless to obtain the pills, then immediately buy them back so they’re not putting more drugs on the street). With his new boss (Michelle Rodriguez) putting the pressure on, he has to set up a multimillion-dollar deal between his operation, the Canadian manufacturers and the Armenian distributors.

If that sounds like a lot of characters, that’s because it is. And I haven’t even mentioned the various supporting characters, spouses, friends, henchmen and so on.

I liked all three main actors in their roles. Claire is fragile but determined, Jake glowers so much he seems to positively steam, and Tyrone’s keening, high-minded oratories about doing the right thing pluck the heartstrings. It’s not enough, though.

“Crisis” is an ambitious movie that I think fails because of a lack of bigger ambition. I can imagine this as a trilogy or limited series that gradually sucks us deeper into an international epidemic, with each story showing the full breadth of every side. What we get feels like a CliffsNotes version of something bigger and better.

Review: "The Drop"

"The Drop" is an intriguing, atypical movie. It starts out with a lot of disparate characters and story elements, some of them related, much of it not. Over time they gradually float towards each other, each piece locking into place in a way that might not have seemed obvious at first.

The experience of watching it is like stumbling upon a disassembled pocket watch, and then witnessing the little gears and springs drag themselves, with almost gravitational pull, into a cohesive whole again. The actual process of putting itself back together can be a bit tedious at times, but at some point everything clicks together.

This is another film based on the writings of Dennis Lehane, who also penned the screenplay. Movies based on his work have been up ("Gone Baby Gone"), down ("Shutter Island") and vastly overhyped ("Mystic River"). Here is a film that seems to contain the Lehane mythos boiled down to its inky essence. The story happens almost entirely inside one seedy bar, and the few frozen city blocks around it.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saganowsky, who sloshes drinks at Cousin Marv's Bar. Bob speaks in a clinched little croak, almost whiny; he isn't terribly bright and is passive almost to the point of transparency. There are rough types who come into the bar, and some try to get a rise out of Bob, but they leave unsatisfied, because it's like kicking a sweet puppy who only comes back for more.
He is, in short, a mook.

Cousin Marv is mostly a figurehead these days, an aging hulk who barely moves from his corner table. His name's on the bar, and he used to run a little action on the side -- he was, he says, somebody who made people sit up when he walked in. But he got pushed by some tougher Chechen mobsters, and flinched, and now it's their bar and he just runs it.

James Gandolfini could play controlled rage better than just about anybody, so Marv is a fitting final screen role for him.

The title comes from the process of picking one bar at random to be the place where all the gambling and other dirty money winds up for the night -- "the safe for the entire city." It soon becomes clear that somebody's looking to hit Marv's the night it's the drop, and Bob gets caught up in the tide of events.

One night Bob is walking home from work and comes across a bloodied puppy dumped in a trash can. The woman who lives there, a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), helps him patch the dog up, but insists Bob adopt him as his own. He blanches at first, but finally takes on the little pitbull, whom he dubs Rocco. This is, for him, a major addition to his tiny universe, which essentially consists of just the bar and keeping up his dead parents' tidy brownstone.

Accepting the responsibility of the dog changes something in Bob ... or does it? Hardy's performance is one poker face behind another, so we're never quite sure what's going on the other side of that lunkhead mien. Dribs and drabs of information leak out to suggest there's more there. He and Nadia start seeing more of each other, hesitatingly -- it's like two wounded animals sniffing the other's wounds.

Other characters' orbits intersect with that of the bar. There's a perpetually smiling police detective (John Ortiz) who sees Bob at the same church every morning, and wonders why he never takes communion. He starts investigating a stick-up at the bar, and then noses into old crimes that have become part of the neighborhood lore.

There's Eric Deeds (an imposing Matthias Schoenaerts), a hustler with a past connected to Nadia. He casts a baleful eye at Bob for seemingly mysterious reasons, stopping by the bar or his house, claiming Rocco is actually his dog, and dropping idle threats. (Somehow, he makes an umbrella seem weapon-like.)

And then we have the Chechen boss, Chovka, chillingly played by Michael Aronov. He expects Marv and Bob to recover the money stolen during the robbery. You can see the wheels turn in Bob's head, slowly, and in Marv's head, slightly less slowly -- if they could find the money, wouldn't that imply they were in on the job?

Director Michaël R. Roskam takes his time -- too much, really -- building up the suspense, but the plot of "The Drop" eventually gets there.