Sully nailed it, but ‘Sully’ blows it
Seeing as the entire incident, including rescue, took less than half an hour and everyone knows everything turned out great, perhaps “Sully,” the true story of the US Airways pilot who safely landed 155 people on the Hudson River in 2009, could, you know, show a clear sense of how he did it. Why it took someone like him, with 42 years of experience, to do it. What it’s like to be him. Basic stuff.
Instead, “Sully,” an exasperating 90 minutes of stretched-out non-story that feels like director Clint Eastwood’s “The Hobbit,” focuses on the National Transportation Safety Board’s post-crash procedure for a pointless, obvious round of second-guessing. Could captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) have flown back to LaGuardia? Or landed in New Jersey? Um, who cares?
OK. Policy is important. On some level, it’s valuable to look beneath the “hero” label to see the person to which it’s been attached feeling like anything but — and the doubt of wondering if maybe he needlessly risked people’s lives. Except a few things about that. Eastwood can’t decide whether or not the event, prompted by a crop of suicidal birds flying into and busting both engines, is a big deal. While vaguely attempting a sense of PTSD for Sully and his co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart), the filmmaker (who last turned the upbeat musical “Jersey Boys” into a slog) underplays the drama and tension to the point of being anticlimactic. Sully’s nightmares, in which he imagines crashing the plane into a New York City skyscraper, feel less like real dreams than one of the film’s many exploitations of post-9/11 anxiety. Someone actually says, “It’s been a while since New York had news this good, especially with an airplane in it.” Jeez.
In the role of Wife Who Never Leaves the House or Gets Off the Phone, Laura Linney probably wishes she had as much to work with as Kathleen Quinlan, Hanks’ wife in “Apollo 13.” Writer Tom Komarnicki (whose last script was the ridiculous 2007 Halle Berry thriller “Perfect Stranger”) might have explored Sully’s life at least as a way of filling time but just includes two flashbacks to his early flying days and a mild thread of family financial concerns. Brief fear about a possible lost pension just can’t compare to the stakes of saving 155 people, none of whom are developed beyond Woman Who Bought Snow Globe and Guys Who Were Running Late. More importantly, there’s never a doubt about safety on board or on land; the investigation (led by Mike O’Malley) immediately reeks of “Jerks who will have to back off” (and a rehash of the overrated “Flight”), not evidence of real, difficult and potentially damaging bureaucracy.
“United 93,” Paul Greengrass’ extraordinary depiction of the flight that passengers overtook from terrorists on 9/11, shows exactly how to bring a harrowing true story from sky to screen. Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” was the opposite — manipulative and fake. “Sully” registers right alongside the latter, with painfully stiff dialogue (“I want you to know I did the best I could.” “Of course you did. You saved everyone.”) and a structure that cheaply saves its extended landing sequence for a finale, when “Sully” should have opened with it. And then ended.
D+.
