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When a global audience cheered in 2010 at the "miracle" of 33 men surviving for 69 days in a collapsed mine in Chile, you knew a Hollywood movie wouldn't be far behind.
That movie, "The 33," is exactly what everyone would expect: an inspirational tale of survival, perseverance and heroism that works to make audiences feel better about themselves just for having bought a ticket.
It's also something of a mess. It's a mishmash of restrained nobility and melodramatic overkill, with wild mood swings, varied acting styles and storytelling shortcuts.
The action starts at the San José Mine, a copper and gold mine outside Copiapó, in northern Chile's Atacama Desert. On Aug. 5, 2010, a major cave-in trapped 33 miners some 2,300 feet below the surface. Officials topside believed it impossible for the miners to have survived the cave-in — and, even if they had, they would die of starvation or the 100-degree heat before anyone could rescue them.
Director Patricia Riggen ("Under the Same Moon") and a trio of screenwriters split the story — based on journalist Héctor Tobar's book "Deep Down Dark" — into two parts: one up, one down.
Down in the mine, foreman Don Lucho (Lou Diamond Phillips) sizes up the situation as the men realize they must work together to survive. They pick a reluctant leader, Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas), who holds the key to the food cache and doles out their rations.
On the surface, the young Minister of Mines, Laurence Golborne (Rodrigo Santoro), tries to offer sympathies to the miners' families. But María Segovia (Juliette Binoche), a miner's sister, wants assurances that Golborne will try harder. With the media arriving — including Chilean megastar Don Francisco (the stage name for Mario Kreutzberger, who appears as himself) — Golborne and his boss, President Sebastián Piñera (Bob Gunton), foresee a political disaster if the government can't save the miners.
Soon a drilling engineer (Gabriel Byrne) is on the scene, while María and other family members start a tent city with all the amenities. (The scene is reminiscent of the media circus in Billy Wilder's deeply cynical 1951 drama "Ace in the Hole.") On Day 17, the drill reaches the miners, and the families get the first news that all 33 are alive.
Here, the story shifts from a pure fight for survival into something more complex. As the experts drill a hole wide enough to get the men out, the miners receive care packages from loved ones. The pressures of the outside world — such as a news article about Sepúlveda signing a book deal, or tabloid stories about one miner (Oscar Nuñez) with a wife (Adriana Barraza) and a mistress (Elizabeth De Razzo) — start to tear away at the miners' close bond.
This section, showing the 52 days between discovery and rescue, is the most interesting part of "The 33," because it's the closest Riggen gets to showing the miners as individuals. But that complexity doesn't fit the "miracle" narrative, so it gets swept away for the conventional hero story. (How conventional? "The 33" hits the same plot points as "The Martian," only not as gracefully.)
The international cast produces accents and acting styles that are literally all over the map. The result is inadvertently comic and works against the depiction of Chile's solidarity in the global spotlight.
Maybe it was an impossible task to capture the lives of each miner in a 2-hour movie (that's less than 4 minutes per man). But "The 33," in capitulating to Hollywood's need for a neatly packaged hero story, ends up feeling insincere and unworthy of the complicated people it depicts.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'The 33'
The true story of the rescue of 33 Chilean miners becomes fodder for a formula Hollywood treatment.
Where • Theaters everywhere.
When • Opens Friday, Nov. 13.
Rating • PG-13 for a disaster sequence and some language.
Running time • 127 minutes.