Worth: $10.00
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Cast:
Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, Luke Evans
Intro:
...good intentions don’t automatically make for good movies.
Films like this hurt to think about. Not because of the subject matter, although the ongoing tragedy of the U.S opioid crisis is certainly depressing to contemplate. Rather, it’s because writer/producer/director Nicholas Jarecki has his artistic heart in the right place in wanting to highlight the issue, but good intentions don’t automatically make for good movies.
Crisis has a narrative structure similar to early Iñárritu, showing the opioid crisis from three different perspectives that run parallel and occasionally intersect, in this case the pharmaceutical level with Gary Oldman’s professor, the criminal level with Armie Hammer’s federal agent, and the domestic level with Evangeline Lilly’s recovering addict. All three main actors do well enough with their material (Lilly in particular nails the more emotional moments), and the supporting cast featuring Lily-Rose Depp and even Kid Cudi also deliver, but they’re still hampered by a script that is a hyperlink story… but without the link.
By switching back and forth between the three plot lines, Jarecki invests more in the film’s pace and rhythm than in the plot’s coherency. It lacks the flow of films like 21 Grams or the recurring comparison of Soderbergh’s Traffic, or even Cloud Atlas. One plot line feels like it’s in a separate movie from the others (with an oddly upbeat resolution in comparison), one involves a drug baron named Mother, and one basically gets put to the side for a while. A decent cast can only make up for so much, and they’re pushed past the breaking point amidst all this.
But where the structure becomes something of a bigger issue, beyond the hazy lack of connective tissue, is in the reason why films carry this structure in the first place. Usually, it’s to convey a sense of scale and scope, showing the topic being discussed as one with many facets that require multiple POVs. While this story technically covers a lot of bases of the crisis, it’s spread so thin that the information doesn’t really sink in and (even worse) lacks emotional engagement to warrant the dramatization, as opposed to a documentary or even a news segment.
Despite its cast and thesis about the current state of opioids, Crisis ends up being so surface level as to throw its entire narrative structure into question.
