‘Finestkind’ Review: Tommy Lee Jones Might Be The Only Good Part Of Mediocre Crime Drama [TIFF]
(L-R) Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Wallace, Jenna Ortega, & Ben Foster in Finestkind. Courtesy of TIFF.
Normally, you can make it to at least day six of a film festival before struggling to describe the plot of a film. Unfortunately, it’s day three of TIFF, and I’m not entirely sure where to begin with Finestkind. The festival synopsis will tell you that it’s a movie about “Two brothers [who] are pulled into a deal with an organized crime syndicate in Boston.” The first hour will tell you that it’s a movie about fishing. The last 45(?) minutes will tell you it’s a movie about crime. And fatherhood. Definitely about fatherhood.
(L-R) Clayne Crawford, Jenna Ortega, & Toby Wallace in Finestkind. Courtesy of TIFF.
To set the scene, it’s Boston at the beginning of summer. Charlie (Toby Wallace) just graduated college with an English degree. His well-off lawyer father wants him to follow in his footsteps — well, as he puts it, “Not throw your life away” — but Charlie is having none of that. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, per se, just what he doesn’t want to do. This takes him to his half-brother, Tom (Ben Foster), to join the fishing crew on Tom’s boat for the summer. In short, Charlie and Tom, plus their crew of assorted characters, bring the boat out, and in the middle of the night, it sinks. You’ll think, “Oh no, that sucks. Well, at least Charlie’s done with fishing,” but this only gives him more of a desire to “get back out there.” We then meet a number of assorted characters, including love-interest-turned-plot-device Mabel (Jenna Ortega) and Tom’s father, Ray, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who might be the only actor in the film who comes out mostly unscathed. To save you some time, after a sequence of events involving shipwrecks, arguments, an impounded boat, and a whole lot of fishing that makes you go, “Okay, sure,” Tom, Charlie, and their crew find themselves in need of cash — fast. So they do what anyone would: run heroin.
This turn from a “heartwarming” movie about family and fishing to a crime drama comes with maybe 30-45 minutes left in the 126-minute runtime — simply not enough time to close all of these plot threads before maybe the worst imaginable ending for the film. It’s *shocking* that Brian Helgeland, screenwriter of L.A. Confidential, can write a script this awful (he directs, too). The story itself isn’t all that bad — unfocused, sure — but the dialogue, oh, the dialogue. Helgeland clearly wants his film to be perceived as a drama. Unfortunately for him, the dialogue is so bad — not even campy-bad, just plain, simple bad — that most of the “dramatic” line deliveries send laughs into the crowd, more than they do shivers.
Toby Wallace & Jenna Ortega in Finestkind. Courtesy of TIFF.
It doesn’t help that most of his actors are phoning it in, though. Ben Foster is fine as the prickly but ultimately warm ship captain, and Toby Wallace has his moments in his biggest leading role yet, but they can’t seem to properly jump over the script-sized hurdle. Jenna Ortega is sadly miscast as the least-believable drug dealer person this year, regardless of the fact that her character is only used to push the story forward, not create any new emotional and character developments.
Then there’s the self-doubt of it all. Helgeland’s script doesn’t know what genre or style to step into, repeatedly dipping a toe in to test the waters before realizing that none of them actually work for the story the film tells. When the story actually becomes compelling, there’s not enough time to tell it in a way that makes sense and allows its characters to have complete — not rushed — arcs. There are many times where it feels like Finestkind is doing something just so it’s not doing nothing, and they all amount to the most confusing — on a story and character level — finale that’s so out of place, you feel like it was meant to attach to the end of another film altogether. A comparison to the films of the Fast and the Furious franchise may initially feel like a reach, but by the end, that analogy will make sense, I promise.
But hey, if Tommy Lee Jones doing his best impression of whale noises before multiple monologues about fatherhood (that include the film’s best line, “I’m yer fuckin’ daddy!”) and then participating in a donut shop-set shootout with one of the lamest cop-outs of the year, I don’t know what is. A good movie can never be too long, and a bad movie can never be too short, isn’t that right? Either way, Finestkind sinks to the bottom of the barrel like an anchor on the sea floor by the time it’s said what it wants to.
