MOVIE REVIEW
“In the Heart of the Sea”
Grade: D
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker and Cillian Murphy. Directed by Ron Howard.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence, thematic material. In English and subtitled Spanish. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 1 minute.
Bottom line: A cinematic shipwreck
“In the Heart of the Sea” is the story of an ambitious endeavor gone out of control. And so is the film. It is a cinematic shipwreck of epic scale. A flotilla of failure. It stinks as it sinks.
Following a doomed New England whaling expedition in warlike combat with a vengeful behemoth, the movie feels as ill-starred as the beleaguered crew. Every surge of misguided acting, choppy editing and dismal cinematography deserves a loud shout of “Thar she blows!”
And really, at this late date, what else can we say about a film starring Chris Hemsworth? He’s the 21st century’s Steve Reeves. Hemsworth’s ridiculously well-developed musculature makes him capable as Marvel’s mighty Thor but puny in all roles needing a performer’s dramatic grace.
Hemsworth plays Owen Chase, first mate on a seafaring expedition for a bountiful whale harvest. He becomes the instant antagonist to the highborn, inexperienced captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker from “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”). The pair fight with vinegary verbal sparring, not the comic book mano-a-mano that Hemsworth has mastered.
In 1820, Nantucket, Mass., was a key source of the sperm whale oil used to fuel lanterns, lamps and other lighting devices internationally. That year, the town’s whaleship Essex was hunted and attacked by a huge sperm whale in the South Pacific. Swimming at and ramming the ship twice, it shattered the hull, rapidly sinking the Essex and decimating the crew. Adrift for 90 days, 2,000 miles west of South America, the two dozen starving survivors resorted to cannibalism. Few lived.
The event partly inspired Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick,” but this sort of seagoing Donner Party horror story is not the type of film usually released for matinees in the family-focused holiday season. Ron Howard’s vision presents the sailors largely as human parasites, filling wide swaths of seawater with the red blood of slaughtered whales before the turnabout. With little time spent defining the human characters, it plays like a revenge saga starring a gigantic 160,000-pound beast.
Perhaps those cockeyed shifts of perspective are to give us a feeling of seasick identification with the seamen. How else could Howard have assembled the visuals with so many heaving, diagonal, slippery images? Why else would the imposing special effects look like such slipshod make-believe? Steven Spielberg did a much better job with a malfunctioning mechanical shark in “Jaws.”
“In the Heart of the Sea” has a bigger boat, but it is lesser in every manner that matters.
