Out of the Furnace Review

The Braddock mill that opens this film does more for it than the script ever manages. Masanobu Takayanagi photographs the town in bruised green and furnace orange, and the cross cutting between a deer hunt in the hills and a bare knuckle fight in a dirt basement is the one sequence that earns its ambition. Bale plays Russell Baze with the volume all the way down, a man who absorbs loss instead of protesting it, and the prison visiting room scene where he hears his father has died is the finest thing here.

Casey Affleck is raw and twitchy as the brother who cannot stop fighting, and Woody Harrelson establishes real menace in the drive in scene that opens the picture. The trouble is structural. Once the story turns into a hunt it stops discovering anything and starts working through the motions of revenge, borrowing its shape from The Deer Hunter without earning the comparison.

Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker are handed scenes that lead nowhere, and Sam Shepard is treated as furniture. The last act arrives with a sad inevitability that the film mistakes for gravity, and the closing shot reaches for an ambiguity the preceding hour has already foreclosed.