Only the Brave

2017 fire movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots heroically battling forest fires.

Miles Teller has become a distraction. You'd think he could play a punk fairly easily since the guy seems to be a punk, but his character--at the center of far too many scenes in this--just doesn't feel natural. However, he sort of grew on me as this went on. Josh Brolin and Jeff Bridges grumble their lines as you'd expect them to. I'm growing a little tired of Bridges' gravelly thing. It seems like he's phoning in these roles the last few years, slightly adapting the same character over and over again. I want the guy to have another meaty, fun role. The rest of these guys are just sort of around. There are too many of them to provide adequate depth, and their brotherhood or whatever you want to call it starts to get a little redundant after a few fires.

Those fires sure look good. I assume there are no CGI effects, that the makers of this just started forest fires and then put some helmets on Taylor Kitsch and Miles Teller, and told them to run around and try not to burn themselves. There's lots of grit here, the actors spending lots of time covered in sweat and filth. There's an intensity to the fire scenes, and there's this raw, almost beautiful fierceness that almost makes you root for the blazes even though you don't get any cliched scenes where you find out about their families.

I'm surprised I haven't heard animal rights people throwing a fit over the scenes where they catch a bear on fire and have it run through Josh Brolin's dreams. I didn't like that, one because it looked too much like the cover of a European heavy metal group album cover (none specific) and also because it's the kind of dream sequence that can only happen in a movie like this.

This isn't a bad movie at all, but it's not helped by a history of these kinds of these kinds of true-story Hollywood pictures, like The Perfect Storm, that pits manly men against the elements while their significant others stand helplessly and worry about them. The story of these Hotshots is one that should definitely have been told, and it's an entertaining enough movie. Just don't expect anything new here. And brace yourself for a lot of Miles Teller.