Review: Crisis Sacrifices Character for the Sake of Delivering an Op-Ed

Time and again, Crisis shortchanges the human elements of its plot lines.

Crisis
Photo: Quiver Distribution

Nicholas Jarecki’s Crisis is a procedural thriller that rails against the corruption and failures that have enabled America’s opioid epidemic. The film’s structure is its reason for being, the chief concern of Jarecki’s imagination, as the writer-director fashions three plot lines that show how opioid addiction is fostered on differing rungs of society: from the streets, where dealers transact with shady pharmacists, to the universities, where pharmaceutical corporations endow professors with exorbitant grants to “green stamp” their research, to the Canadian-American border, where law enforcement agencies fight an ongoing war with traffickers. In its prioritizing of systemic processes over its protagonists, Crisis almost intentionally invites comparison to any number of Steven Soderbergh films.

The effect of professional processes on human relationships is Soderbergh’s chief obsession as an artist, informing everything from his blockbuster work to his lo-fi experiments. He’s a master of informing potentially dry talking points and procedures with singular human anguish, as in the wrenching close-ups of Benicio del Toro in Traffic and the unnervingly clinical specificity and Cronenbergian dread of the carnage driving Contagion. By contrast, Jarecki’s filmmaking has, more times than not, an enervating back-and-forth quality that suggests three TV pilots that have been haphazardly woven together to prove obvious points. Perhaps unsure that his opioid-centered subject matter is enough to sustain a film, Jarecki resorts to crime-thriller clichés, from the vengeful mother to the cop who’s too honest for this compromised world, larding Crisis with 30 minutes’ worth of trite endings.

In Arbitrage, Jarecki skillfully merged melodrama and agitprop, utilizing a seductive movie-star performance by Richard Gere as a hedge-fund magnate to elicit our complicity with an attractive architect of social disfunction. Such an audience-indicting trick, pulled to galvanizing extreme by Martin Scorsese in The Wolf of Wall Street, acknowledges that social avarice is a magnification of our own, while delivering the pleasure of allowing viewers to vicariously gorge on bad behavior without consequence.

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Crisis suggests that Jarecki has forgotten this trick, as it’s populated by rigid pawns who test or stimulate the audience in no way and who aren’t to be distracted from their missions, aside from a few obligatory asides that suggest a screenwriter checking off boxes. Dealing with generic Canadian and Armenian gangsters for Fentanyl, undercover D.E.A. Agent Jake Kelly’s (Armie Hammer) resolve is never frayed nor examined, while recovering addict Claire (Evangeline Lilly) barely blinks in the face of investigating her son’s fatal drug overdose, which could have been homicide. One would think that a son’s death via a mother’s own drug of choice would lead to survivor’s guilt, to a potential relapse, to some insight or event that’s invested with existential weight, but such possibilities are hinted at only to be brushed off. Instead, Jake and Claire are both rendered unremarkable action-movie heroes.

Crisis’s most ambitious and potentially troubling story is also its most laughable. Doctor Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman), a veteran scientist and educator who’s been running experiments on Big Pharma’s dime for years, is shocked that a donor might want something in return, namely greenlighting a fictional, supposedly non-addictive drug that’s potentially more fatal than Oxycontin. Tyrone’s naïveté, hysterically played by Oldman, is ridiculous given the character’s professional experience, and here Jarecki squanders the film’s best idea.

When Tyrone threatens to turn whistleblower, the university and pharmaceutical corporation dig up an old sexual harassment claim to discredit him, though the emotional ramifications of this threat—and of Tyrone’s potential hypocrisy as a supposed man of truth—are never plumbed. In fact, the filmmaker is so astonishingly incurious about the inner lives of his various characters that he even skims over the effect that Tyrone’s grandstanding might have on his marriage. Time and again, Crisis shortchanges the human elements of its stories—in other words the drama—for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

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Score: 
 Cast: Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear, Kid Cudi, Luke Evans, Michelle Rodriguez, Indira Varma, Lily-Rose Depp, Mia Kirshner, Michael Aronov, Adam Tsekhman, Veronica Ferres, Nicholas Jarecki, Daniel Jun, Martin Donovan  Director: Nicholas Jarecki  Screenwriter: Nicholas Jarecki  Distributor: Quiver Distribution  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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