The Greatest Trick

Oh boy. Never did I realise that this was in fact a DTV pile of poo disguised as a Hollywood movie. Never before have I wished so violently that someone would just break every violin in the orchestra playing the score. And never before have I cared so little about characters dying.

The Andrea Gail is a sword-fishing trawler which sets out at short notice in an attempt to find the biggest haul of fish that it can. Leading the trip are Captain No-Personality (George Clooney), with Young Rookie Man (Mark Wahlberg), Gruff but Sensitive Man (John C Reilly), Bad Egg Man, Ugly Man and Dispensible Character Man in tow. They all love their captain (in some moments it’s faintly homoerotic), which is why they are stupidly willing to go with him into practically uncharted waters where a big old storm is brewing. Meanwhile their wives, girlfriends, children and people who barely know their names are left at home rubbing their hands together with worry. For the whole film.

The film is based on a true story - the Andrea Gail never did return to Gloucester, Massachusets after being caught in a freak storm in 1991, and the fact that all those on board died is a tragedy. But frankly, so is the fact that their memory is supposedly being honoured by this boring, messy film, in which all the money has been spent on (admittedly good) special effects to make the waves look big and nasty, a fair whack on Warner Bros’ water rates I would imagine, but none on writing a script which caused you to care about any of the characters. In fact, the crew of the coast guard rescue helicopter which we kept inexplicably seeing were more engaging than the crew of the Andrea Gail. The problem with knowing it’s a true story before you watch it is that you know the ending. It should therefore at least be interesting to see how it gets there, but this movie fails abysmally. When one character has to be resuscitated after falling in the sea, I found myself comparing the scene to the resuscitation scene in the Abyss: this movie pales in comparison. I simply couldn’t care less whether he lived or died.

Now, this grudge might sound a little odd, because it is rare for a movie script to only contain ‘realistic’ dialogue, but The Perfect Storm really took the biscuit. In an emergency situation, how many hard-living business-minded fishermen/women do you imagine would exclaim down the radio, “You’re sailing into the middle of the monster!”? There were whole swathes of dialogue where characters were talking and I had no idea what they were going on about, nor did I care, and at some points nor could I hear them! More on the music later… There were cliches involving dreams, letters being read, characters’ thoughts being transmitted to their loved ones via the power of magic or something, and so many odd directorial decisions that I began wondering if this was the same Wolfgang Petersen who had directed another, infinitely superior boat movie, Das Boot, about life aboard a German submarine during WWII. But sadly, yes, the IMDb confirms that it is.

And finally, why oh why do people keep employing James Horner to compose their scores? All the man seems able to do is bathe everything in cloying strings, no matter what the situation on screen (see Titanic for further proof. Or alternatively, don’t bother. It’s mostly crap too. Hmm, spotting a pattern here… Disaster in water + James Horner = terrible film with exception of special effects). There were times when I thought he had composed the music without watching the film. The strings just kept going. And kept going. They swelled. They quietened. They swelled again. Only once was I aware of them not being there, and that was because the characters were listening to some RAWK on their tinny radio. Was Petersen really happy with this? I find it hard to believe.

Everything about this movie screams ‘we deserve Oscars’; thank goodness it only got nominated for two and didn’t win them. There is some justice at the Oscars after all.