Review: Crisis

Treating drugs like a disaster movie is nothing new. Looked at from one angle, Crisis is basically an opioid-focused update of Stephen Soderberg's Traffic (itself adapted from a miniseries); looked at from another, it's part of an on-going tradition that gave us (to cite the most recent example) Zero Zero Zero. This is wide angle story-telling, where individual lives matter only so far as they fit into the big picture and the moral of the story is that drugs are a disaster wreaking havoc on society across the board.

To make this point, Crisis focuses on three people: Claire (Evangeline Lilly) a single mother with a junkie past who finds herself drawn back into that world after a tragic incident involving her son; Dr Brower (Gary Oldman), a university scientist who's dropped in hot water when a test involving his corporate sponsor's new wonder drug suggests it may not be that wonderful; and DEA agent Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer), who's running an undercover operation trying to catch one of Canada's biggest opioid smugglers (unlike cocaine and meth, opioids come in from the North) and only has a few days to bring in a big fish.

On the whole the three stories fit well together, though Dr Brower's drawn-out battle with the tenure board occasionally seems to be spinning its wheels to make sure it doesn't finish half an hour before everyone else. The chilly locations around Detroit and the Canadian border give proceedings a very different feel to the typical cartel tale, re-enforcing the sense of isolation each character feels. This isn't a film full of warm family bonds; even Dr Brower's wife, who supposedly is a big motivation for his wavering (there's doing what's right, and there's doing what gets you paid) rarely rates a mention.

Isolation aside, what's missing from this is any real sense of why people take opioids. Jake has an addict sister but she's only in a handful of scenes pissing him off with her motiveless love of drugs; Claire's solution to her problems is vengeance, not pills, especially as it turns out her situation isn't as simple as it seems (and may be connected to Jake's case). And Dr Brower's sudden development of a spine after years of taking corporate cash, while clearly motivated by actual concerns about the dangers of unleashing another opioid onto an already saturated market, might have seemed more convincing coming from someone half his age.

Without that, this is a disaster movie that never really explores what the disaster actually is. Why Americans are downing painkillers in massive amounts should be prime material for a thriller, but this ends up focusing on the kind of stories we've seen plenty of times before and while it's competently handled (and the performances are generally strong), it all feels a little stale. Brower's story is probably the most interesting in theory, but in practice it drags, Oldman gets shouty, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a way that refuses to make any solid moral judgement at all. 

Strangely, his story is also the only one that doesn't link up in any way with the others, despite the ending providing an obvious (and depressingly realistic) link to Claire's story. With her history of pain-related drug abuse and Dr Brower's role in the release of a (bogus) wonder drug, it feels like the film finishes one scene early; presumably "the cycle continues"-style endings are only crowd-pleasers when they refer to cops chasing drug lords.

- Anthony Morris