The Finest Hours is a Disney-produced dramatization of a 1952 nor'easter which split two large ships in half. In the face of near certain failure and death, four outmatched New England Coast Guard sailors (one played by Chris Pine) set out in a small boat to rescue one group of survivors. The film plays the expected notes—the burden of decency, the ferocity of the sea, tidy nostalgia for the Greatest Generation—and the third act has enough reassuring half nods (of the you-did-a-damn-fine-job variety) to precipitate the on-set chiropractor's own finest hour, but almost every platitude and dose of syrup is countered by a competent performance and a vertiginous technical flourish, including a series of shots assembled to simulate a single camera move, tracing a piece of information from a ship's rain-and-wind-swept top level to its rapidly flooding interior.

B

This is an enjoyable movie and actually a pretty fast-paced one - I thought the two hours flew by - but it suffers a bit from how old-fashioned it is. The entire thing is a very conventional survival story and has definitely been done before. The cast is fantastic - it's basically a who's-who of great character actors behind charismatic lead Chris Pine - and most of them get at least something to do. All of the water sequences are also very exciting. I thought while she performed the material well almost all of the Holliday Grainger subplot was stupid and the movie continuously dragged when it cut to her character. B