The Finest Hours

The heroic true-life Coast Guard rescue of 32 sailors from a sinking tanker off Cape Cod in the teeth of a horrendous storm in 1952 gets a lackluster filming from director Craig Gillespie and writers Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson (from the nonfiction book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman). It’s a story tailor-made for Hollywood—it’s remarkable that it hasn’t been filmed before—but virtually everything goes wrong except the CGI and sound effects. The script simply bristles with clumsiness and bad lines, while Gillespie, a director who has spent his career missing the point, seems more concerned with getting everyone’s Massachusetts accents just right than with building tension or suspense. He even manages to get a weak performance from Chris Pine as the leader of the rescue party.