Crisis (2021)
Chemical Reactionaries
For the second time in just over a month, I find myself defending a movie I quite enjoyed against critical attacks that are, in my not-so-humble judgment, patently unfair. I have no stake in how Nicholas Jarecki’s Crisis performs, but I’m very much invested in the public’s perception of my calling—a perception that isn’t helped when critics dogpile (or, worse, ignore) a film due to a scandal that coincides with its release.
In January, bizarre stories emerged claiming that Armie Hammer had a cannibalism fetish. Two months later, the LAPD began investigating Hammer for sexual assault—an allegation similar to ones that have followed him since his marriage fell apart last year.
These events eclipsed the late March release of the actor’s new film. Despite having garnered some pre-release (and pre-scandal) praise, Crisis was savaged by the handful of critics who bothered to review it (similar to what happened with Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy in 2017).
Perusing Rotten Tomatoes, the two main points of contention boil down to:
Writer/director Jarecki having put out a derivative version of Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic (which itself was a knock-off of a British TV series)
Hammer’s “problematic” off-screen troubles
Because this is ostensibly a movie review, we’ll come back to the second point in a bit.
Like Traffic, Crisis is an ambitious drama in which huge stars help weave a complex tapestry centered on the drug trade. I haven’t seen Soderbergh’s film since 2000, so my memory of it isn’t the best. I recall being impressed by its scope, but more than a little bored with its lack of passion. The detached “banality of evil” thing is fine for some, but I prefer good ol’ fashioned indignation in my war-on-crime movies. Hell, even the title “Traffic” is inert; it’s something you get stuck in. “Crisis” implies a pulse-pounding ordeal that must be overcome…or else.
In keeping with his previous film, Arbitrage, Jarecki tackles a Big Corruption narrative by closing the walls in on protagonists who are inevitably consumed by a system they either designed or stewarded. Hammer plays Detroit-based DEA agent Jake Kelly, whose long-in-the-works bust of two international drug operations is almost at hand. Kelly and his partner, Stanley Foster (Jarecki), have set up a “pill mill” through which Armenian and Canadian druglords will converge, creating a network of Oxycontin and Fentanyl distribution routes across America.
The movie opens with a chance courier bust that threatens the whole deal.
Meanwhile, Evangeline Lily’s Claire Reimann struggles to put her life back together following a family tragedy. The architect and single mother was already on shaky ground, thanks to a prescription painkiller addiction from which she has yet to fully recover. Now she’s shattered, lost, and starved for answers.
Crisis’s third pillar involves Dr. Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman), a popular university professor who moonlights as a researcher for a major pharmaceutical company. His team has just discovered a dangerous flaw in the corporation’s soon-to-be-approved “addiction-free” painkiller. Brower butts heads with gatekeepers from both institutions—including his long-time friend and dean of the school (Greg Kinnear), who worries about losing a significant endowment.
These are the broad strokes. Over the course of nearly two hours, Jarecki introduces a dozen more characters and subplots that knot some of the main threads together and left others dangling in my mind (though some of the players never meet, their actions affect seemingly parallel storylines).
The principal actors give intense performances that could be taken as melodramatic, but which I read as desperation suitable to their characters’ predicaments. Oldman, in particular, is given to bursts of indignation, spitting dialogue that sounds like he’s just read an alarming statistic in USA Today. But what other response is there, really, when dealing with corporate cover-ups, non-disclosure agreements, and the threat of media-backed character assassination for prospective whistleblowers?
I’d probably yell a lot, too.
I’ve seen Hammer criticized for giving a dour, one-note performance. Again, Crisis is not the life story of Jake Kelly. It’s a glimpse into a really awful couple of weeks in which his career, family, and faith in the justice system are given a lethal dose of tragedy. Like Richard Gere’s shady investor in Arbitrage, Hammer draws his character’s inner turmoil to the surface; the key difference is that he also finds himself staring down the barrel of a gun on a regular basis. A dour existence indeed.
Evangeline Lily is the film’s standout. Far from the typical “avenging angel” cliche, Claire has her ass handed to her when going up against hardened criminals. The fact that she perseveres in the face of adversity speaks a bit to her resilience, but more to the fact that she’s taken a righteous stance in stomping out her addiction. She wants to stomp out everyone else’s addiction, too, by cutting off the head of a sly, whispering, omnipresent snake.
Crisis is an unrepentant Message Thriller—the adult version of an Afterschool Special. That’s only a dig if you don’t remember the importance of Afterschool Specials. They were dramatizations of scary situations that kids from my generation were in danger of confronting face-to-face. The black market drug problem claims tens of thousands of lives per year, and its tendrils reach from the gutter to the echelons of so-called respectability. Crisis is Jarecki’s attempt to key the audience into a reality that they might be too distracted or too disinterested to fully understand—in much the same way Soderbergh did with Traffic and Michael Mann did with his cigarette-scandal movie, The Insider.
I can only guess that the critical hypocrisy regarding these films has something to do with Brand Filmmaker caché. Crisis was not released by a major studio; has no Awards Season buzz, and has been afflicted by a scandal that is easy to associate (mistakenly) with the quality of the movie itself. It’s the height of irony that many of the same critics who slammed the film for being derivative fell all over themselves a few weeks later in praising Godzilla vs. Kong—a movie they’ve literally seen dozens of times over dozens of decades.
Getting back to the scandal angle, Nicholas Jarecki may be uniquely positioned as a nexus of controversial actors. Having worked with the likes of Nate Parker, Woody Allen, Amber Heard, a pre-Iron Man Robert Downey, Jr., and now Armie Hammer (among others), it’s conceivable that someone will invent a Kevin Bacon-style game for him. That would be unfortunate, and I assume all cosmic and karmic consequences if such a thing becomes real.
Regardless of what you think about Hammer or any of the other stars in the Hollywood galaxy who’ve been arrested, imprisoned, or even just accused—the sticky fact remains that they are often famous for a reason: their work is entertaining, and some part of our lives would be diminished in the absence of that work.
The idea that a movie, and the hundreds of people who labored to make it happen, should be punished for the off-screen indiscretions of its performers is criminal. Sadly, too many of us are addicted to celebrity drama.
Sadder still: the most spectacular falls provide the most euphoric hits.
