I had seen an early version of Nicolas Jarecki‘s Crisis (Quiver, 2.26) back in early 2020. Its original title at the time went by “Dreamland.” Production on the film had wrapped up in early 2019, but I’m not too sure what happened in the ensuing two years after that. It seems to have been swept up in some kind of unconfirmed post-production hell.
The film, whose final version I caught this past week, is a skillfully setup, but bungled multi-character drama. Comparisons to Steven Soderbergh intermittently better “Traffic” will be made. If Soderbergh’s sprawling mosaic dealt with the drug crisis in America in ways both intimate and wide, Jarecki’s film, which tackles the current opioid epidemic ravaging through white america, is a throwaway drama with a very predictable connect between its half a dozen or so lead characters.
It turns out to be rather disappointing considering Jarecki’s last film was the above-average hedge fund drama “Arbitrage.” In “Crisis,” the writer-director is in over his head with the handful of storylines, and countless amount of characters unfurling before our eyes on-screen. Sadly, the screenwriting here is very predictable, one can predict many of the dramatic twists before they happen.
It doesn’t help that this problematic film stars Armie Hammer, an actor plagued by real-life controversy at the moment, playing a DEA agent running an undercover operation to bring down French-Canadian and Armenian drug syndicates. Gary Oldman is a Michigan University professor who discovers that a big pharma company his research lab works for may be covering up a botched study of a new opioid drug set to be available in the market. Meanwhile, Evangeline Lilly is a mother who suddenly loses her son to a drug overdose, but wonders if he was actually murdered.
Other characters come and go in this drama, but they all turn out like filler cardboard-cut props rather than fully-fleshed and humane people. Although Jarecki’s agenda is admirable, any film tackling as important an American issue as the opioid crisis deserves credit for righteous intentions, but the resulting drama feels generic and like stepping on a foot load of cement — it never moves.
Cycling between each story and its characters, it all feels methodical rather than effortless, as if the characters are being used as chess pieces to advance a narrative rather than being concisely sketched out. After fully watching its 120 minutes, it’s hard not to see why Jarecki’s misbegotten epic was delayed for such a long time.
SCORE: D
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.