SULLY

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2.5 stars
At a spry 86, Clint Eastwood (American Sniper) turns out the sorts of films you’d expect of a man his vintage: solid, dependable, right-leaning and inclined to repetition.
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These days he’s hardly a firebrand but given his record, he’s also the kind of elder you’d invite to dinner in a heartbeat (just don’t mention Trump). And so it is with Sully, his account of one of aviation’s best good-news stories ever.

Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberg (Tom Hanks – Captain Phillips) was piloting a US Airways jet when it plowed into a flock of geese and lost both engines above New York. Faced with impossible choices, he made a snap decision to land the aircraft in the chilly Hudson River which, as an air traffic controller observes, no one survives. Planes aren’t boats. Yet incredibly, survive they did – all 151 passengers and crew.

Eastwood opens the story with a plane smashing into a skyscraper. It’s an emotive start, and a nightmare for Sully whose trying to ‘sleep off’ the events he’s just been through. It’s also a stark reminder that things could have been so much worse than a controlled belly-flop into the Hudson. This sets the tone of the movie as the captain and his dewey eyed officer (Aaron Eckhart - The Dark Knight) are pitched against an adversarial committee intent on finding fault. “Why didn’t you fly to La Guardia?” they whine. “Because I couldn’t,” is the intoned reply of a true professional.

From here there are some minor observations about intrusive media and stranded family, plus a well staged set piece of the accident itself, but mostly the movie stays with Sully and the committee. It’s an odd choice given this is primarily a film about people doing their job – airline staff, air traffic control, rescue crew and, notably, Sully – people who worked hard to prevent an accident becoming a disaster. Hearings are a natural and essential extension of that process. To turn them into minor villains is questionable, and ultimately, rather dull. They’re not very good at it.

Far better to focus on the media storm that erupted around Sully as he’s turned from pilot to hero. It would give us deeper access to his character and those around him - Sully’s wife especially (a thankless role for Laura Linney - Mr Holmes) loiters on the end of a distant phone and seems to be there simply to lift Sully from the shadows, and it seldom works. It would challenge hero-fication, trial by media and better address the impossibility of knowing without being. For by the film’s end, we know as much about Sully as when we went in, and precious little about the man that you couldn’t have read on Wikipedia.

Add the awkward repetition that creeps in to the narrative (the same questions, the same emotive angst and not one but two planes crashing into the New York skyline), it begins to feel like Eastwood is on auto-pilot (pardon the pun). There is some interesting material here, and for the first half, you’re in the cockpit sweating like a demon. It’s exhilarating, until it isn’t. Hanks does his rock-solid best but isn’t given enough to bring Sully into the light: he’s no Captain Phillips, and he should have been.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at Event Cinemas, Bondi Junction, Sydney, on 5 September 2016.
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STARRING
Viggo Mortensen
Frank Langella
George MacKay
Steve Zahn

DIRECTOR
Clint Eastwood

SCREENWRITER
Todd Komarnicki

COUNTRY

USA

CLASSIFICATION
M

RUNTIME
96 minutes

AUSTRALIAN
RELEASE DATE
September 8, 2016
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Sully (2016) on IMDb
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