Out of the Furnace Movie Review

            

            Out of the Furnace is directed by Scott Cooper and stars Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Willem Dafoe, and Zoe Saldana. It is about Russell Baze (Christian Bale) whose life we see get worse and worse as several events transpire and his brother, Rodney Baze Jr. (Case Affleck) is going down the wrong path and gets into some trouble, causing Russell Baze to have to go help his brother.

            With this review, and all further movie reviews, I will just separate the review by pros and cons. Though, I may mention some small cons and the pros section and some small pros and the cons section to show why something may be good but not fantastic.

I will start with the pros:

            The first half of the movie is a compelling, dark, deep and convincing drama that brought the feeling of satisfaction of a movie in me. I really liked this first half.

            The performances were shocking and astounding. Christian Bale, star of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, American Psycho, and The Prestige yet again demonstrates his wide range of acting with this film. Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) shows an awe-inspiring performance in this film. Woody Harrelson (No Country for Old Men, Cheers, Zombieland, Now You See Me), like Christian Bale, proves that he has a very wide range of acting with his superb and exceptional performance.

            

            This film has a slow build that works well and does what it needs to. With over an hour of nothing but drama, this film works as it needs to semi-well. The first two times a gun was fired, I jumped. The slow-building, quiet drama worked.

            I felt that this was not a dull film. I never started to lose interest and it maintained a steady pace. I really enjoyed many scenes of the first half of this film and enjoyed the rest. The drama is interesting and it has one other aspect going for it that is the next pro.

            This is, to some extent, a different and original idea. Although I have seen forms of this idea before, this is a different type of idea. It is also directed in an unconventional way. The story is told in an unconventional fashion.

            For the first half of the film, the unconventional execution of the semi-unconventional story made the film surprising and unpredictable. I did not know what direction the story may have gone in and I had a hard time even trying to guess what would happen next.

            This film had some very well directed fight scenes in the first half of the film. They made me uncertain of some aspects of the fights and how they could possibly transpire. That cause for some minor intensity in these scenes.

Now that I have listed the pros of the film, it is now time to get to the cons:

            I first have several reasons listed for why the first half of the film was very good, but not fantastic. It did not have riveting dialogue, it had some weak plot points, it had one that was terribly weak and never worked for the story (I will get to that more later), it had some drama too early on before we knew the characters very well making it not work, and some of the drama was not handled very well.

            The film seems longer than it really was and is a bit too long. As this film was about to conclude, in my mind it was about one-hundred fifty minutes (2 hrs 30 mins) long, but the actual running time of the film is 1 hr 56 mins. The film contains one plot point/side story in particular which I will get into next that should have been completely erased from the movie. That way, it would have seemed shorter and been shorter.

            The side plot was with Zoe Saldana a love story/triangle she has with Forrest Whitaker/Christian Bale and Forrest Whitaker that did not propel the story along at all. It served no purpose and was just there to have Zoe Saldana and Forrest Whitaker in the film and to take up time. It really bothered me and was not in any way good for the film. It was not interesting and unnecessary.

            

            

            The second act of the film took a very bad turn into predictability and some unrealistic minor clichés. It almost became a completely different genre and started become more and more Hollywoodized liked most movies are today. It lost all of the credibility that the first half had and replaced it with something not nearly as good.

            The final act of the film was a clichéd mess of a borrowed plot for the end and just a bad ending for the film. It lost the near-greatness it had in the first half completely. I even predicted the idea of what was going to happen as the second half of the movie started.

            During the finale of this film, there was a huge convenience that changed the entire ending of the film. The entire ending would have changed if it was not for this convenience. This con of the film is probably the one that annoyed me the most while watching it.

            The final shot of the movie was illustrating the final plot point of the movie. Though the shot was an unnecessary way of illustrating what the final plot point was, my primary issue was the plot point. I did not buy that that is what would have happened. That brings me to another con that I will mention next.

            Some of the actions of characters, I did not buy into. I would not believe that some of these things would have really happened. I do not think that some of the characters would do some of these things.

            This film tries to be like an art house movie, but the plot is very simple. The director tells the plot in an unfocused and an “all-over-the-place” fashion. He tries to make this very simple premise complicated, but it comes off as the bad side of complicated: convoluted.

            

            The director also seems to lose sense of direction in the second half of the film. The scenes are not that well directed anyone, especially fight and action scenes. Somewhere in the script and execution something in this film went terribly wrong, and I do not quite know what it is.

Those are all of the pros and cons I have with Out of the Furnace. I think that it is an alright film.

            While it maintains subtle interest and genuine darkness as a convincing drama in the first half, almost everything goes wrong in the second half.