The Desperate Hour Review: A Shamelessly Exploitative School-Shooting Thriller

The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material.

The Desperate Hour
Photo: Roadside Attractions

If Paul Greengrass made a film about a school shooting but solely from the perspective of one of the student’s moms, it might look something like The Desperate Hour. To be fair, while United 93 and 22 July thoughtlessly exploited real-life tragedy, Phillip Noyce’s film at least has the good sense to focus on a fictional event. But The Desperate Hour otherwise sticks frustratingly close to the template laid down by Greengrass, particularly in the grossly manipulative machinations of its plot and churning sense of tension and impending doom.

Amy (Naomi Watts) is on a long morning run in the woods, and the titular hour refers to the time that it takes her to get to her son Noah’s (Colton Gobbo) school, where an active shooter incident has broken out. That would be sufficient enough drama for most films, but Amy is also dealing with the grief of her husband’s recent death and anxiety over Noah’s severe depression. And the filmmakers insist on backing her near-constant panic and emotional strife with a relentlessly overwrought and sappy score that highlights the fact that she’s less a fully realized character than a cipher whose pain is whittled down to fodder for cheap suspense.

The Desperate Hour, which was formerly titled Lakewood, is constructed around the gimmick that, outside of the opening and closing few minutes, the audience stays with Amy the entire time as she runs, limps, and crawls her way to her son. Contrivances pile up swiftly as Amy grows increasingly dependent on and attached to an auto body shop owner and a 911 operator, among others, who help her over the phone in her delusional quest to stop the school shooter from afar. The film even sees Amy working telephonically with the F.B.I. at one point.

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But as far-fetched as The Desperate Hour’s mom-on-a-mission storyline may be, that’s not even its most glaring fault. Rather, it’s the way that it callously uses a school shooting as the backdrop for action thrills, and toys with our fears and expectations with an offensive bait and switch that leads us, alongside Amy, to question whether Noah may, in fact, be the shooter.

Had the filmmakers bothered to explore Noah’s mental health issues or the dynamics of his and Amy’s relationship in the months following his father’s death, The Desperate Hour may have at least somewhat justified its taking on such a sensitive phenomenon as its subject. But we’re given nothing of substance regarding Noah and his state of mind. He’s seen only a few times, or just long enough to show us that his room is messy and that he doesn’t want to get up for school—not exactly something that differentiates him from millions of other teenagers.

The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material, which reveals nothing novel or enlightening about school shootings or the people immediately affected by them, primarily because it’s not actually interested in them. In the final act, when the film abandons any connection to reality altogether, it becomes abundantly clear that Noyce and screenwriter Chris Sparling are merely using these all-too-familiar tragedies as a shameless way of generating emotional stakes to enliven the painfully generic thriller tropes that are the real, and weak, backbone of the film.

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Score: 
 Cast: Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Andrew Chown, Sierra Maltby, Michelle Johnston, Woodrow Schrieber, David Reale, Jason Clarke, Chris Marren  Director: Phillip Noyce  Screenwriter: Chris Sparling  Distributor: Roadside Attractions, Vertical Entertainment  Running Time: 84 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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