#Reviews of only the brave movie movie
#Reviews of only the brave movie plus

As Donut intermingles with the others there’s plenty of “locker room talk” and general dick-swinging, which one can either interpret as accuracy in film-making or perpetuating a culture that encourages patriarchal thinking.

#Reviews of only the brave movie plus

Marsh gives him a chance, which means hazing from his new comrades plus a lot of pushups and personal responsibility.

The rise of the Hotshots mirrors the redemption of Brendan McDonough AKA “Donut” (Miles Teller), a local drug abuser who gets his girlfriend pregnant and decides he’s got to change his life. There’s an awful lot of alpha male posturing, to the point that Marsh’s wife, horse trainer Amanda (Jennifer Connelly), accuses him of doing a “John Wayne thing” when he stares off into the distance instead of enjoying some time in the tub. It’s a little bit fascinating to watch the machinations of how they step up to hotshots, but also a little bit ridiculous. For they are the best! And everyone knows it! But politics and regulations and, I dunno, taxes get in the way. The regular army are Type 2s, or “Deucers”, and when we first meet Brolin and his gang they’ve been stuck as Deucers for too long. “Hotshot” isn’t just a nickname, it’s a term to describe a type of wildfire suppression expert. There’s a moment in this film in which Bridges cracks under duress for just an instant and emits a groan that is so heartbreaking, so true and yet so underrepresented in movies that it all but washes away much of the boilerplate machismo of the film’s first half. Jeff Bridges plays an Arizona emergency services supervisor (exact position is a little vague) and godfather figure to Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) and his guardians of the range, the Granite Mountain Hotshots. But when you’ve got as keen an eye as he does, plus a cache of tough guy performers facing impossible odds, it is extremely effective.

#Reviews of only the brave movie movie

Much of the movie is as blunt as the title suggests, and Kosinski leans into it in the third act.

Only the Brave follows the same pattern (“What’s it like to be an elite wildfire squad?”) and only if you know that it’s based on a true story do you realise it isn’t going to end so well. It’s really more of a procedural film – “What’s it like to work at an airport?” – with political dealings, romantic woes, a comic side plot and finally some explosives thrown in at the end. This unpredictable quality to Only the Brave ends up being its greatest strength.Ī point of comparison would be the 1970 film Airport, which, thanks to its many sequels, suggest wall-to-wall disaster tension to those who haven’t seen it. Furthermore, the “hangin’ out” sequences with the Granite Mountain Hotshots don’t exactly feel cut from a Richard Linklater film, but it’s in a similar ballpark. (Jeff Bridges portrays the town fire chief.) The 20 men under Marsh's supervision can't possibly get the character development they deserve in a two-hour movie, but the script by Ken Nolan ('Black Hawk Dawn,' 'Transformers: The Last Knight') and Eric Singer ('American Hustle') handles the vignettes with an eye for the telling detail.This isn’t to imply the sequences of mighty conflagrations aren’t heart-pounding, it’s just that there are fewer than you might expect. Their marriage is marked by Marsh's frequent, prolonged absence during the wildfire season.Īs the film begins the Prescott firefighters are angling on certification as the nation's first municipal team to be awarded elite status.

The actor plays supervisor Eric Marsh, married to Amanda (Jennifer Connelly), a horse whisperer of sorts who nurses injured wild horses back to health. In 'Only the Brave' Brolin's real-life character is defined, and haunted, by images of a bear consumed in flames, charging the camera. Movies in flames tend to click with an audience, because they feed the craving for escapist disaster ('In Old Chicago,' 'The Towering Inferno,' 'Backdraft') even as they remind us of what's happening right now, for real, and without the melodrama (in Northern California, for example).