Film review: ‘Deepwater Horizon’

There is already a fine film about the Deepwater Horizon blast and oil spill (the 2014 documentary “The Great Invisible”) but, realizing that any historical catastrophe can be improved by a dramatization starring Mark Wahlberg, Participant Media ordered the new film “Deepwater Horizon.”

It begins with a voiceover by the real Mike Williams, a Deepwater survivor with a thick Southern accent, and there is a delicious moment where you imagine that Wahlberg will try to match that drawl. To have listened to him speak in such a syrupy cadence for an hour and 45 minutes would have been worth five times your ticket price. Unforgivably, he is just the best Mike Williams he can be with a barely concealed Southie accent.

Mike is a Mr. Fix-It type at home - repairing cabinets and showing his daughter how to make a Coke can gush like an oil derrick - and a loving husband to his Bud Light Lime-sipping wife Felicia (Kate Hudson, without much to do but establishing real rapport with Wahlberg).

Mike is bound for the doomed rig and, after several pointed depictions of gassing up on the way to the Gulf of Mexico, he arrives to serve as Mr. Fix-It on the Deepwater Horizon. He attempts to repair a mountain of tasks ­- phones, alarms, pressure gauges and more are on the fritz - and a whiteboard reminds everyone that the oil discovery project is already 43 days behind.

Among the other men aboard are Deepwater’s safety czar Jimmy “Mr. Jimmy” Harrell (Kurt Russell, his a mustache turned down to a frown) and onboard British Petrol exec Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich, who certainly does not deny us a candy-coated Southern accent). Mike, Mr. Jimmy and Vidrine have a standoff of formidable facial hair and strong opinions about how to safely extract billions from the Gulf.

Mike dismisses Vidrine’s reckless push for progress and argues you can’t rely on “Hope as a tactic.” And he has a fantastic anecdote about Okie noodlin’, a method of catching catfish in which he sticks his hand into the mud and hopes to get bitten. He contrasts this intentional personal risk to the drilling business, where there are more unpredictable hazards when you reach into a dark pit. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, what happens is a cataclysm.

Director Peter Berg, an auteur of explosions, returns to terror on the seas though, regrettably, Rihanna was unavailable to bring her naval experience to bear again as she did in his 2012 miss “Battleship.” There is a breath of fresh air from the bridge in the form of Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) who is wiser then her male colleagues, often relying on simple and relevant statements of fact: “The water’s on fire.”

Aside from one nice scene of an oiled pelican slamming into and cracking windows, there’s little focus on the environmental impact of the spill. Still, compared to some of Berg’s other work, in which cinema art blends with military recruitment material, “Deepwater Horizon” is unlikely to cause a spike in applications for oil rig gigs. The American flag waves brilliantly, but against orange waves of flame - it’s oddly beautiful in the manner of a Hell decorated with BP logos.

One suspects this isn’t (Wahl)Berg’s intent but there is also a critique of masculinity embedded in the film. Setting aside the rapaciousness of the BP contingent, there are many “good guys” making quick and confident decisions, sometimes heroic but more often bad. The lesson of the film might be this: Men ought to stop using strained sports and automotive repair analogies and just run sufficient safety tests before using their drills.