Another round of press photos for a miserable-looking Tommy Lee Jones is all Finestkind can offer. Despite throwing its weight around and enlisting some help from Jenna Ortega, the Brian Helgeland-directed feature is shy on dramatics even when the fishermen’s debt at the heart of this starts bubbling to the tepid surface. Boat-based tensions bubble over and bring out neither the best nor the worst in a cast of tightly bound fishermen and their families. With some poor digital effects on a rescue mission and a lack of pace to the events which get these fishermen to a spot of real danger, Finestkind suffers massively from a tonal whiplash the whole way through. The U.S. Coast Guard must tire of people like this, though we are here to champion their hard work.
A sunken vessel and one college dropout later, the New Bedford port is given a chance to shine in a drama as dull as Coda and stuck in the past. It tries and fails to bring about a centralised, small-town aesthetic as Bait did a few years prior but there is no such luck to the bars and dives which are taking place here. Greasy and grotty in all the wrong ways, Finestkind is trying and failing to showcase fishing as a bold and noble cause which is worth risking your life for. The financial implications of such are showcased by Jones’ bit-part support and the black-and-white assertions made by a desire for wealth over the hand which can grasp it. All very tired and expected stuff, though Finestkind is in the business of dressing up as a small-time indie flick, so it must play the part of tiring messages.
Clayne Crawford is the stickler for this business then, the hopes of tearing down the profitable five-piece at the heart of this is centralised for no good reason. Much of it depends on the five o’clock shadow strapped to the face of Ben Foster, whose performance here is little more than a thousand-yard stare and eyes which bleed regret. There is something to be said for the systematic life, as if working on a fishing vessel is some great escape, though the cultural differences between the UK and the US may be the great divide here. Not the life for many, the pursuit of scallops who are fished by men never in a financial position to dine on them frequently. Yet Helgeland hopes to drum up his infatuation with this line of work as a noble one.
Horrendously dull and contrite, the waves of Finestkind will wash over viewers with little effect. The damnable part of all this is how little the charms and talents of actors like Ortega and Jones, who are each to their own vastly talented and great draws for this fisherman-themed feature, are utilised. Wasteful at the best of times and dull the rest of the way, it reminds of features like Stillwater or Joe Bell, complete middle-of-the-road pieces supported by a particular star who is then saddled with the great burden of bringing out the emotive core. By the time they get to it, the audience is asleep, the mounting message out of date and the once-beating heart of becoming a fisherman is passed over, out of style and peculiarly portrayed as a promised source of wealth and good fortune.
