Director: Brian Helgeland | Writer: Brian Helgeland
Starring: Toby Wallace, Ben Foster, Jenna Ortega, Tommy Lee Jones
Unfortunately, because I happen to love Ben Foster (not kidding at all; you can see it plain as day in Flash Forward, he’s simply special), Finestkind is one of the worst movies of the year, on par with Shazam 2, which is saying something. Helgeland’s last movie was Legend eight years ago; maybe he needed to knock off some rust. Well, consider yourself loosened up, Brian, but we won’t be thanking you for putting us through the ringer while you took a stretch. Finestkind is bad, bad cinema, the kind that you mostly only see on the Hallmark channel, and I won’t be forgiving anyone for that anytime soon.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts, fishing is life, and Tom Eldridge is a good fisherman; a strong captain, has a solid crew, knows where the big scallop catches are. But he’s also a bit untethered, and can’t be counted on for much of anything, other than hard work. When his younger brother Charlie wants to fish for the summer in between college decisions, the boys reform an inseparable bond. But when shit hits the fan after some dumb choices, the pair will have to fight together to keep afloat in a situationship suddenly gone violent.
Finestkind is the unfortunate combination of terrible directing and terrible acting, a movie that was doomed from the get-go. Helgeland obviously doesn’t have his sea legs under him yet, and the wonderful casting of Foster and Jones is wasted on a script and a crew that simply was never going to work. Seriously, Ben Foster is incomparable: Yuma, Messenger, Pandorum, Lone Survivor, Hell or High Water, Hostiles, Leave No Trace, Galveston, The Survivor. But Wallace & Ortega are abysmal, and the plot of the film is just embarrassing. Someone should have seen this coming a mile away and stopped it, for all our sakes, before it actually got made and became something people would actually watch.
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆