91 min.
Release Date: June 30, 2020 (Digital & On Demand)
Fine actors and rain machines cannot overcome junky material in “Force of Nature.” Director Michael Polish (2006’s “The Astronaut Farmer”) ventures away from his elegiac tone-poem style of independent filmmaking and bafflingly goes for a full-on B-movie, but the prospect of that sounds a lot more fun than what transpires on screen. Everyone puts in as much enthusiasm into this project as a nine-to-fiver does clocking in and out for a paycheck. Despite there being a heist in a hurricane—see 1998’s “Hard Rain” or even 2018’s “The Hurricane Heist” instead—“Force of Nature” is too unspectacularly routine and indifferent to deliver even bare-minimum thrills. It needed to be a lot worse or a lot better just to make an impression.
As a Category 5 hurricane approaches San Juan, Puerto Rico, suicidal cop Cardillo (Emile Hirsch) is assigned with new partner Jess Peña (Stephanie Cayo), a native Puerto Rican, to evacuate an apartment building and move the residents to shelters. First, they have to pick up and escort home one of the complex’s residents, Griffin (William Catlett), who bought out an entire meat counter for his hungry cat. Cardillo and Jess come across one tenant, stubborn ex-detective Ray (Mel Gibson), who’s ridden with health problems and refusing to leave, despite the efforts of his medical-professional daughter Troy (Kate Bosworth). The cops think they have their work cut out, and that’s before John the Baptist (David Zayas) and his goons shoot their way past the superintendent in order to steal an expensive piece of art from a Nazi descendant.
As entirely forgettable as it is, “Force of Nature” might open with one of the most unnecessary in medias res sequences, taking place eight hours prior to the story proper, followed by an amusingly amateurish, faux-slick credit sequence. With repetitive zooms and whip pans of beach fronts and luxury high-rises as the credits roll and an unseen man haphazardly gives a weather report to overstate what is to come, it seems to be edited by someone who has never edited an actual movie before. To say first-timer Cory Miller’s screenplay is all wet would be a little hacky, but it sure is lazily plotted with cardboard characters and zero stakes. Since there is no longer much novelty in setting a heist during a hurricane, the one interesting wrinkle in this pretty pedestrian premise is Griffin and his hungry domesticated tiger named Janet, whom he’s taught to hate cops. If only “Force of Nature” had turned that tiger on the greedy art-hunters earlier.
Emile Hirsch tries to earn sympathy as Cardillo, aka Cop with a Tragic Past, while Stephanie Cayo has a lot of screen presence, only to be along for the ride as Jess and then tied to a chair. As Ray’s long-suffering daughter Troy, Kate Bosworth (who’s married to the director in real life) might find the most emotional depth with the material given to her, although it’s hard to buy that Troy would find the time to make small talk and fall in love with anyone, let alone Cardillo, during a hurricane with gun-wielding criminals. In a role that seems intended to be his return to starring in action pictures (the marketing materials pat him on the back, calling him “legendary”), Mel Gibson is more of a supporting player as the irascible Ray, and it feels like Gibson is just phoning it in here.
Though the script flirts with themes that feel timely, its attempts are never enough to fly in the face of other, better movies. The bad guys are generically menacing, their bullets almost always ricocheting and rarely hitting the good guys; the death-wish-having cop finds redemption with a woman who has daddy issues; and the callous retired detective sacrifices everything for his daughter. Never suspenseful or entertaining enough to be a compact pressure-cooker thriller, “Force of Nature” should have either been more absurdly inane or legitimately hard-hitting rather than just settling for plain old mediocrity. Where are the Floridian alligators from “Crawl” when you need them?
Grade: C -
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