Sully feels like a dead stick landing

Movie review: Sully

Tom Hanks has enough emotional charisma to keep Clint Eastwood’s hero conventions in the air, but this cinematic salute to Chesley Sullenberger’s heroism loses thrust

Sully

3/5

Starring: Tom Hanks, Laura Linney, Aaron Eckhart

Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

MPAA Rating: PG-13

 

Sully Sullenberger Poster Movie

Tom Hanks plays another captain in trouble in Sully

By Katherine Monk

Clint Eastwood has spent a lifetime crafting the contours of heroism. A stoic silhouette in the arid dawn of a Western. A rugged jawline amid the blood and guts of armed conflict. An old fart with a tool box and a Gran Torino who refuses to buckle in the face of the forces that be.

It’s all about defiance and a gritty desire to beat unbearable odds, a shout-out to the primal drive for survival; that after the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air that somehow, a patriotic symbol remained.

Eastwood knows this scarred landscape, so his decision to take on the story of Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger’s incredible landing on the Hudson River back in 2009 feels emotionally correct. Throw Mr. All-American Tom Hanks into the equation and it’s everything we hope it should be, at least on paper: A riveting drama crafted from a real-life event that moved the entire world.

Yet, much like 33, the recent movie about the trapped Chilean miners starring Antonio Banderas, Sully has a hard time negotiating the distance between the familiar news footage and the Hollywood film factory.

We want to see these movies about real disasters to get the inside scoop on what really happened as well as some deeper understanding of character.

Sully aims to deliver all that through a laborious replaying of events featuring Hanks in the cockpit, the dramatic landing and eventual crash investigation, but even with Sully’s name on the screenwriting credits, something about Eastwood’s movie feels forced.

The central problem is the need for a dramatic arc for an event that unfolded in under four minutes. US Airways 1549 from New York to Charlotte struck a flock of birds seconds after takeoff, and landed miraculously intact on the Hudson shortly after.

We all saw the stills of the rescue, but the dramatic water landing wasn’t well recorded — only  a few security cameras caught the final glide.

As a result, the real draw in Sully is the digitally recreated landing — offering us all the action in full high-definition glory. It’s a gorgeous piece of rendering that satisfies our curiosity and rubbernecking urges.

Flight attendants yell “Brace! Brace!” We see the plane splash down, the cabin fill with water, the passengers panic as they step onto the wings over frigid blue water. We’re right there with them, living out every nightmarish fantasy of the white-knuckle flyer.

These are the scenes where the movie really connects because we can relate. It’s the rest of Sully that feels a little heavy-handed as Eastwood moves past the water landing and into the ensuing National Transportation Safety Board investigation.

To give it more dramatic punch, he creates an adversarial environment — something the real investigators deny, resulting in some unplanned controversy. Sully has to justify his actions and explain why he put the plane down on the water instead of on a nearby runway.

The courtroom tropes turn it into genre fodder that gets stuck in your teeth. Fortunately, Tom Hanks’s personable screen presence acts as a gentle floss, easing the ugly and sticky bits out of mind with his manly vulnerability — just like he does in every movie, whether it’s Apollo 13 or Captain Phillips.

Hanks’s raw charisma is the engine keeping this Hollywood beast in the air, but like Flight 1549 itself, the movie has trouble making it to the destination.

The script toggles back and forth between the emergency landing and Sully’s personal life, with Laura Linney appearing intermittently as the concerned spouse and Aaron Eckhart playing First Officer Jeffrey Skiles.

It’s not a smooth transition, and the dramatic punctuation marks feel entirely out of place. And yet, thanks to Hanks and the power of sheer curiosity, Sully is entirely watchable. For a brief moment, it may even leave you breathless, but it’s not a graceful execution by any stretch. If anything, it’s a dead stick landing on a makeshift emotional runway.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, September 9, 2016

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Review: Sully

User Rating

2 (2 Votes)

Summary

3Score

Tom Hanks sits in the cockpit of yet another doomed vessel in Sully, Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort that uses American hero cliche as fuselage and Tom Hanks as the emotional engine. Hanks capitalizes on his masculine vulnerability to keep the movie flying, but the script lacks emotional thrust, resulting in a dead stick landing. - Katherine Monk

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