5/12 ForReel Score | 2.5/5 Stars

Padraic McKinley’s gold mining drama The Weight is the modern equivalent of a TNT original movie that your dad might watch on a Sunday afternoon when there’s no football on. This film is a glossy exploration of a brutal part of history that would make Dad feel like he could’ve handled the manual labor that Depression-era prisoners were forced into. This is clearly a homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s 1977 remake, Sorcerer, aimed at folks who do not remember watching those. However, its attempted sense of delirium feels performative in comparison. I’m sure that Ethan Hawke and his group of comrades did have to deal with some naturally uncomfortable elements while filming in the jungles of Germany. Even so, they still seem just a bit too cozy. The Weight is desperate to convince you of its grit, but every step of this allegedly arduous journey is taken down a well-trodden path.

We find ourselves in 1933 following single father Samuel Murphy (Hawke). While looking for a new place to call home, he gets into a fistfight with a group of cops posing as street thugs. Samuel’s daughter, Penny (Avy Berry), is put into the foster system as he is sent to a work camp run by the tough-as-nails Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe). Clancy takes a liking to Samuel’s determination and quick thinking and decides to assign him and a couple of other men a dangerous task in exchange for their freedom. They must smuggle bars of gold from a remote mine back to the camp in order to keep it from being stolen by bandits. Naturally, things do not stay civil for long.

Right off the bat, The Weight fumbles its most enticing promise. Hawke and Crowe only share the screen for a few minutes. Once the men set off on their expedition, Warden Clancy rests comfortably in his office until the third act. It’s a shame. These two legends share an easy chemistry in their brief exchanges, even if it is a little hard to believe the connection between their characters. Surely Samuel isn’t the first of Clancy’s subjects to demonstrate a mild amount of ingenuity. All he really does is figure out how to move a somewhat large rock off the job site. Why is that boilerplate intelligence (along with a sob story about a child that most of the other incarcerated men must share) enough to make Clancy sympathetic? The ultimate reasons become slightly more clear as the story continues, but they take shape mostly without Crowe in the picture.

Hawke gives us a generic version of his tortured but gentle man's man routine alongside a supporting cast who cannot dream of even reaching that level. Austin Amelio, Avi Nash, and Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen all play interchangeable variations of the same ornery guy. They have the same testy conversations about their suspicions of one another that we’ve heard in a thousand other movies like this. They simply exist to brush against Hawke for artificial tension that Crowe would’ve added in more naturally. Meanwhile, Julia Jones’ Anna does stand out in the sense that she is a woman among men, if for no other reason. She wards off threats while finding solace in Samuel’s softer nature, but there’s next to no interiority to her beyond that.

There are some decently tense setpieces that showcase Padraic McKinley’s somewhat promising action chops. His take on Sorcerer’s iconic rickety bridge scene, in which our squad has to toss each bar of gold individually across the rickety chasm, features some terrific handheld camerawork by Matteo Cocco. We feel as though we too are trying to catch these heavy bars. This immersive style continues through a claustrophobic underwater sequence and a tense shootout, tracking the action through fluid motion that is at times reminiscent of Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on The Revenant, although nowhere near as accomplished. McKinley is constricted by the mediocre screenplay by Shelby Gaines and Matthew Booi. Should he get his hands on something better, he could adapt the sensibilities that do work here into something truly thrilling.

The Weight does not fill the gaping void for adventure movies in the modern landscape because it is not daring in any sense. We’re watching a cardboard cutout of legendary films starring actors who have spent their lives wishing that they could be Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It would be great to leave the jungle next time we make one of these but more importantly, we need actors who are willing to create personas that we have not seen in this genre before. These guys are delivering something that will lull your aforementioned dad to sleep.

The Weight Is Somehow Treacherous and Underwhelming