OUT OF THE FURNANCE  2.0 ***

 

          This is the second movie by director Scott Cooper-his first was “Crazy Heart”' where Jeff Bridges won a Best Actor Oscar. Christian Bale and Casey Affleck star as brothers  living in a small industrial town in Pennsylvania. Christian works in a steel mill  handling a furnace. Casey just got back from the his 3^rd tour in Iraq. After an accident that results in the deaths of 2 people, Christian goes to prison with for being DUI.. Casey does another tour in Iraq, returns home and  gets tired of trying to get a regular job------he does not want to work in the steel mills like his brother and father----and gets involved with Woody Harrelson, an illegal bare-knuckle fight promoter. Woody also deals in drugs and looks like a typical mean as a snake redneck hillbilly although he is from New Jersey-I guess they have redneck hillbillies in New Jersey, too. When Christian gets out of prison, his life turns into a country/western song; his girlfriend has left him, his father is dead, and his brother  disappears. The only thing left for Christian to do is to try to straighten out his life and get some kind of closure.

   

 Nothing about this bleak, brutal, blue-collar melodrama will make you feel good. It’s the opposite. It is a depressing downer of a movie. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong for everybody. "Out of the Furnace" puts its heroes, villains, and victims through a grim gauntlet.  Essentially, "Out of the Furnace" focuses on the bond of brotherly love between two brothers who encounter more than their share of suffering at the hands of the sadistic, bare-knuckled fight promoter played with chilling intensity by Woody Harrelson.  

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Christian Bale ditches the Batman cape in exchange for a goatee and bedraggled look. “Out of the Furnace” is a mediocre movie. It doesn't have anything to do with the acting which is really quite good. The movie is just is not fulfilling. Bale, not surprisingly,  plays his part well, and is one of the saving graces of this subpar film which is simply too bleak and too slow .

 

It's rated "R" for language, violence and drug content and has a running time of 1 hour & 56 minutes.

 

Clark