Mark Walhberg and Kurt Russell star in "Deepwater Horizon," a new film that looks at the real-life oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that created the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Neil Rosen filed the following review.
"Deepwater Horizon" is the name of a new movie that looks at the real-life oil rig explosion that happened in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010.
Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell are two of the bosses working on the rig, and they're trying their best to make sure safety standards are being met. But they have to contend with a greedy BP oil exec, played with glee by John Malkovitch, who wants to cut corners and drill baby drill no matter what the risks are.
The first half of the movie is filled with a lot of technobabble that's incomprehensible, unless you're an oil rig engineer. There's also little character development. We see a brief, cliched look at the home life of Wahlberg's character, with Kate Hudson wasted in a stereotyped role as his wife. But there's no backstory to Russell's character at all.
The last 40 minutes just deal with the oil rig disaster, and it's a nonstop barrage of fire and explosions. From a special effects standpoint, it's impressive, but who cares, because after a while, it becomes tedious and mind-numbing. And that's not the feeling I should have from watching the depiction of this true-life, horrific event.
Director Peter Berg has made a conventional and formulaic disaster/action movie. Sadly, by doing this, he insensitively winds up trivializing the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The ecological disaster, the months that it took to plug the hole that spilled millions of barrels of oil into the gulf, and the harm to the environment that came from all this are only addressed in a 10-second footnote that you read at the end of the film.
Judged strictly as a big-budget action film, we've seen it all before in dozens of other movies, and it's boring and uninvolving.
Neil Rosen's Big Apple Rating: One-and-a-half apples