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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
If you can say nothing else about director Peter Berg: the man has a brand, and he plays strongly to it. Since 2004, with the lone notable exceptions of 2008’s Hancock and 2012’s Battleship, Berg has focused his work on a tight handful of topics: based-on-true-life stories about the military/War on Terror (The Kingdom; Lone Survivor), high school football (Friday Night Lights), generally anything you’d find in a red-state campaign ad. In 2016, Berg’s focus managed to get even tighter: real life stories of massive American tragedies from the 2010s. Patriots Day, about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, is in theaters now, while Deepwater Horizon, about the 2010 BP oil-spill disaster, is but an on-demand rental away.
Berg has appeared to have found his muse in Mark Wahlberg, who stars in both Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon. It’s sometimes funny to imagine that the one-time Calvin Klein model and Funky Bunch rapper is now America’s go-to actor for meat-and-potatoes heroism, but he plays the part well. In Deepwater, he plays Mike Williams, an engineer aboard the titular oil rig. The opening of the film, full of omens and portent, sees Mike at home with his wife (Kate Hudson, who will go on to fret dutifully for her paycheck) and daughter, before heading out to work on the rig. I’m serious about those omens, too. Phones stop working, smoke alarms on low battery beep, there’s even a bird strike on the chopper headed out to the rig, making this an odd (and far more tragic) counterpart to Clint Eastwood’s Sully.
Once out on the rig, Berg’s film goes through the motions of setting up the disaster. The rig, as multiple characters will end up explaining, is in a pretty significant state of disrepair, and corners are being cut in attempts to stabilize the rig. Kurt Russell gives an extremely Kurt Russell performance as “Mister Jimmy,” the rig supervisor, pushing for the integrity of the rig in the face of profiteering suits. The BP officials, led by John Malkovich (giving a rather cartoonish performance), push for a pressure test on the rig that will yield the results they want. It’s an obvious recipe for disaster.
Deepwater Horizon is the rare movie where the build-up is flawed, but the payoff is more than solid. The accumulation of suspense in the lead-up to the rig explosion is far too blunt and obvious for a movie where the audience knows what’s going to happen. Cross-cutting from unsuspecting rig worker to unsuspecting rig worker is effective the first few times, but quickly loses its potency, as does the camera lingering on Malkovich after every damning decision he makes.
But once the rig explosion actually happens, Deepwater Horizon is a remarkably effective and harrowing disaster movie. With the pieces in place, Wahlberg and Russell — along with Jane the Virgin‘s Gina Rodriguez (as the rig’s navigation officer) and a nearly-unrecognizable-underneath-the-grime Dylan O’Brien — have to escape the rig as it blazes an inferno around them. Rodriguez is particularly effective, making a great case for herself as a TV star who should easily be able to handle the transition to film roles if she’s given the opportunities.
The technical proficiency in these scenes on the burning rig manage to keep a tight focus on the characters as people — vulnerable, fallible, non-superpowered people — in a way that an equivalent movie from a Michael Bay never quite seems able to do (or interested in doing). For as much as you want to roll your eyes at Berg for proclaiming himself Hollywood patron saint of American grit, he does right by the events of the story and the people involved.
