Film reviews: Finding the Way Back | The Old Guard | Greyhound | Litigante | Spaceship Earth

Finding the Way Back has every cliché in the book but it still works, thanks to Ben Affleck’s affecting performance as a washed-up basketball coach, while the Tom Hanks-scripted naval thriller Greyhound is sincere but not terribly interesting

Finding the Way Back

Finding the Way Back (15) ****

The Old Guard (15) **

Greyhound (12) **

Litigante (not rated) ***

Spaceship Earth (12) **

Redemptive sports dramas are clichéd by nature. Take a broken-down athlete, give them a failing team or a wayward talent to coach, add in some addiction issues and some family drama and you’ve got the makings of an inspiring, compulsive, watchable drama about someone getting their life back on track. Sure there are variations: said broken-down athlete might get back in the ring or on the field themselves. And yes, there are examples – The Fighter, The Wrestler, Moneyball, Creed – that find narratively dazzling ways to subvert expectations. But it’s the inherent formula of these movies that helps make them so enduring when done well, even for sports agnostics.

New Ben Affleck drama Finding the Way Back understands this to such a degree it doesn’t even try to hide the fact with the title. From the moment we meet Affleck’s sad, burly and bearded construction worker Jack Cunningham – eyes downcast, shoulders slumped, sipping from a coffee cup we’ll soon realise is filled with booze – we know his life has gone wrong in a major way. So when Jack – who’s estranged from his wife, emotionally isolated from his family and living alone with beer cans for company – gets an out-of-the-blue offer from his old high school to coach the basketball team he once led to glory, it’s not long before his straight-talking, profanity laden coaching style starts reversing the team’s – and his own – downward spiral.Which sounds hokey in the extreme. And yet the film is made with such low-key sincerity it doesn’t play that way on screen. Affleck, for one, is great as a blue-collar guy who doesn’t really know how to articulate the pain welling up inside him; he plays the beer guzzling Jack like a wounded bear slumping off to his cave whenever things get tough. Director Gavin O’Connor also has form in this genre, having previously turned the Tom Hardy mixed martial arts movie Warrior into an unabashed four-hankie weepy for fight fans. He pulls off something similar here: delivering an emotionally devastating blow midway through that unlocks his protagonist’s personal demons in a way that might seem dramatically manipulative but actually works as truthful reflection of Jack’s bottled-up nature. The end result is an Eddie Vedder song away from fully opening the floodgates, but does just enough to leave you with something in both your eyes.

It’d be hard to imagine a more boringly executed take on an intriguing concept than the one served up in Netflix’s latest action movie The Old Guard. Starring Charlize Theron as the leader of a band of immortal, self-healing mercenaries who’ve dedicated their extended lives to making the world a (slightly) better place, its Highlander-meets-X-Men premise is squandered on a dreary plot in which Theron’s axe-carrying, centuries-old warrior has to locate a newly emergent immortal (played by KiKi Layne) in the present day while Chiwetel Ejiofor’s CIA agent, working in cahoots with a pharmaceutical tech company, tries to capture her team to harvest their DNA. Director Gina Price-Blythewood (The Secret Life of Bees) keeps the mood relentlessly dour, which only reinforces the boilerplate dialogue and jars with some of the hammier performances. A few bone-crunching fight sequences aside, it’s no fun at all.

There’s not much entertainment value in new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound either. A Second World War naval thriller set on an unprotected stretch of the Atlantic in which supply ships are especially vulnerable to German U-boat attack, it’s another Greatest Generation passion project for Hanks, who also wrote the script. Sadly, his obvious respect and reverence for the subject doesn’t make it any more interesting. Taking the lead as a veteran naval commander with no actual experience of battle, Hanks attempts to keep the focus on the internal conflict driving his character, Ernest Krause, whose need to project strength under pressure is constantly undermined by his own feelings of insecurity. Director Aaron Schneider, though, seems more interested in cutting away to the CGI-heavy battle sequences and the supporting cast, which includes Stephen Graham, are all but indistinguishable from each other thanks to Hanks’ script, which is good at providing naval specifics, but not at supplying fleshed-out, fully rounded characters.

Set in Bogota, French-Colombian writer/director Franco Lolli’s sophomore feature Litigante is a well acted dysfunctional family drama about a hardworking lawyer and single parent (Carolina Sanin) whose fractious relationship with her dying mother, also a lawyer, is putting an almost intolerable strain on her already stressful life. Lolli uses the legal profession as a metaphorical way into exploring the trials of family life, but while the naturalistic cast are good, it doesn’t build to an especially satisfying conclusion.

Neither does Spaceship Earth, a disappointing documentary about the 1991 mission by a crew of eight scientists to live for two years in a biosphere completely closed off from the rest of the world.Full of narrative red herrings – was it a cult? Were they really scientists or were they actually performance artists? And what is future Trump acolyte Steve Bannon’s role in the story? – Matt Wolf’s film, like the experiment itself, feels like one big tease.

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