Out of the Furnace should be thrown into the furnace. Before I watched this movie I thought it was going to be good because I liked the story where Rodney Baze Jr. (Casey Affleck) mysteriously disappears and his older brother, Russell (Christian Bale), takes matters into his own hands to find justice. First, this disappointment was written both Scott Cooper and Brad Ingelsby while it was directed by Scott Cooper.
This starts off at a drive in movie theater with Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson) being very abusive to his date, one of the guys in the neighboring cars tries to do something about it but gets beat up. Then it goes to show you the area that Russel and his younger brother Rodney live in. You find out that its not the best area because Rodney is gambling to to try and break even. Things just get worse for him though because he gets more in debt and then Russel finds himself in prison. To try and work off his debt Rodney gets involved with some street fighting but that alone does not make enough to get his head above the water so he gets himself involved with one of the most violent crime rings, one that will cost him.
There is absolutely no flow to this film and it drove me crazy, I just wanted to throw something at the TV I was so irritated. Russell gets into a car accident where he is very disoriented and very upset, screaming asking for help because there are people in the car that he doesn't know if they are OK or not. The very next scene he is in prison... WHAT THE HELL! Why not start the movie off with him in prison instead of giving us a little bit of him with his brother before hand and then a car accident?? As an audience we can put it together that they are brothers and love each other based off of their interactions they have when Rodney comes to visit Russel we didn't need the first twenty minutes building up to that its just a waste. That isn't event the tip of the iceberg of things that annoyed me in this movie though. His entire prison stay was three scenes that lasted a total of 7 minutes of the film so why even have that at all??? You could easily get the same point across by just starting when he got out of prison and giving us the story from there. Having chopped scenes leading up to him getting out of prison did two things for me, 1. I started to lose interest in the film because it started annoying me and 2. I lost where the story was because it wasn't being told smoothly. I don't want to give away anything for those who want to see the film so I wont tell anymore about it but the rest of the film is the same way very choppy and hard to follow.
The best thing about this film was Casey Afflecks performance he did a very good job as a person suffering from PTSD and he shows it when he gets up in Christian Bale's face. I don't know what they were thinking when Zoe Saldana was cast because I think she is amazing and her character was highly underused. Woody Harrelson did do a good job at being the villain in this film from the first scene all the way until the end he embraces the character. These are a group of some really good actors but I feel that because the story and the way it was put together they couldn't shine to their full potential.
Overall this movie is not one I would recommend seeing and it gets a D. With the fact that it doesn't flow makes the story really hard to follow which just made me lose interest in the film. That is unfortunate because I was really looking forward to seeing this. Don't waste your time watching this because there are so many other films that are better than this that you can enjoy.
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