SEPTEMBER 13, 2016
Clint Eastwood is 86 years old.
I don’t mean to be an ageist — I’m a Medicare recipient myself — but how this man turns out the quality of movies he does at 86 just astonishes me and is an inspiration to us all.
Is “Sully” good? Yes. Is it great? Not quite sure yet. It’s certainly not up to the level of 1992’s “Unforgiven,” but still “Sully” provides a very promising start to the fall movie season..
You know the story. Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) flies his US Airways airliner on a course from NY’s LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte when his plane is suddenly hit with a flock of geese that causes both of his engines to knock out. With the aid of his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (a very good Aaron Eckhart burdened with a mustache the size of a hairbrush), he manages to turn his aircraft around and, coming to the conclusion that he can’t make it back to LaGuardia safely, decides to ditch the plane on the Hudson River on the West Side of Manhattan.
Let me just say that the scenes of the plane landing on the Hudson are just spectacular. As opposed to its use as a tool to allow superhero fighting superhero in summer tentpole movies, the CGI here serves the story, and that’s how it should be used.
It is particularly true in the first scene when Sully has a nightmare where he plows his plane into a New York skyscraper that, seeing it on the weekend of the 9/11 anniversary, was not the most comfortable day at the movies, but the way that Eastwood visualized it was just so effective. Eastwood has a history of great disaster effects — the opening sequence of his not-so-great film “Hereafter” featured a tsunami that was more compelling frankly than any tsunami footage I’ve ever seen on You Tube.
Back to “Sully.” There’s not a lot of plot here, but what there is has been fashioned into a very interesting form by screenwriter Todd Komarnicki, who starts the story after the landing on the Hudson (a bold choice), where Sully is being investigated by the NTSB (National Traffic Safety Board), which apparently is not happy at how they’re depicted in the film. Komarnicki faced the very real challenge of telling a story to which we already know the outcome and put some suspense in it.
He manages to do it by turning “Sully” into a bit of a mystery film. Because Sully “eyeballed” the situation in judging that he could not safely get his plane back to LaGuardia, that judgment is called into question when flight simulators appear to prove that he could have made it. How can Sully and Skiles ever prove that their call was the correct one provides the gist of the drama of the film’s second half.
The film’s narrative doesn’t always work. There’s a half-hearted attempt to personalize some of the passengers, who are shown fighting over a snow globe souvenir or desperately trying to make it to the gate on time. Ultimately, though, the story is not really about them.
Hanks and Eckhart have great chemistry and, even more importantly, they are credible as a team. However Mike O’Malley as the lead NTSB interrogator does play up the villainy a little too much, and Laura Linney has a throwaway part as Sully’s wife receiving phone calls from him, assuring her that he’s all right.
If you want to see “Sully,” make sure that it’s in a theater, because those remarkable shots of the plane landing are simply breathtaking. And you can be sure that this will never be shown as part of American Airlines’ in-flight entertainment.
GRADE: B+
