Overwrought ‘Finestkind’ wastes a talented cast
Imagine wasting the amazing talents of Ben Foster.
A bunch of roughneck fishermen working a boat for a living face an uphill battle when their boat gets torched, and every fix to a problem turns into another, bigger problem. Mix in local drug dealers, mean bosses, new girlfriends, estranged brothers with different dads coming together, and some more drama into the fray. All of it seems like a nice little movie named Finestkind.
The cast is impressive, sporting fine talents like Ben Foster and Tommy Lee Jones, as well as lesser known but talented folks like Tim Daly and Lolita Davidovich rounding out the cast. Brian Hedgeland, screenwriter for a lot of good movies with a similar pulp, is at the helm. Why would people hear next to nothing about this last year?
The answer is because it’s not a good movie. It’s overwrought, overacted, grossly formulaic, and doesn’t give you many characters to truly care about. It also gives the overshadowed Toby Wallace an important role that he doesn’t flourish in, lessening the supposed powerful effects of the story. Remember when Foster and Chris Pine played convincing brothers in Hell or High Water? He forms zero brotherly chemistry with Wallace in Finestkind, which is named after a popular saying among fish boats… or something the central family says a lot in this movie.
The drug dealing subplot comes out of nowhere in the third act, and doesn’t really work. Clayne Crawford’s big bad comes off more like a big, bad diet coke that didn’t come with ice. He talks big, looks out of place on screen. Since we don’t take him seriously, the dramatic stakes are never felt.
Count Finestkind as the first time that I have seen Ben Foster bored or unable to give a magnetic performance in a movie. He makes the bad ones better, enhances the great projects. Here, he’s a fishboat captain who takes on his younger brother (Wallace) as a new boat worker, and the crew just keeps finding ways to bump into catastrophe. When their misadventures get into crime, overdoing it Crawford comes into play and the film just drops. Jenny Ortega isn’t good nor bad here, more ineffective like most of the cast.
Everything is overdone in Finestkind, maybe except for Jones. He looks oddly at ease working with lesser material, bringing his scenes up higher than the plane his character exists in. He can still bring that morose glance of fatality better than most. If only he could manage to give some of that firepower to Wallace.
Whether it’s in this year’s The Bikeriders or this movie, he just can’t keep up with his castmates or stand out. He hasn’t entered Liam Hemsworth land of bad (sorta pun intended), but he’s not someone that has excited me when he’s in a film or show. Maybe that changes as he gets older. Hey, it took me years to be able to appreciate Tobey Maguire’s on screen persona.
In the end, it’s a streamable movie (currently on Paramount Plus) that won’t make you feel mad for clicking play but won’t give you as much as the cast and premise initially promise in the previews. Sometimes, it falls apart from script to screen without being a total loss.
Final diagnosis: If you have scrolled left through 13 other movies, click on this one and give it 30-45 minutes of your time to see how much you get out of the setup. I wanted more from a Ben Foster role, and it’s not a fault of the actor. Same goes for most of the cast, unable to bring credibility to a rough script.