Movie Review: 'Crisis'

Crisis is a quite good drama about the opioid crisis and the ways in which our government and major corporations selling opioids have grown unscrupulous in their dedication to greed. Directed by Nicholas Jarecki, director of the Golden Globe nominated Arbitrage, Crisis has the ambition of Traffic if not that film’s incredible execution. Though Crisis is quite a good movie with a group of terrific performances, the film’s preachiness is sometimes a turn off but not one that ruins the movie.

Crisis features an all star ensemble cast that is led by Gary Oldman as Dr Tyrone Brower. Dr Brower is a college professor who also oversees a lab often used by drug companies for independent testing of new products. Professor Brower is intended to be a rubber stamp for pharmaceutical companies eager to get over the hurdles in place from regulatory agents. However, when Dr Brower’s investigators uncover an unexpected issue with a new pain drug, Dr Brower finds himself at odds with the company very much responsible for his continued grant funding.

In a completely separate story, Armie Hammer plays undercover DEA Agent Jake Kelly. For Jake, the war on drugs, specifically opioids, is personal. Jake’s little sister, Emmie (Lily Rose Depp) became addicted to Oxycontin and eventually moved on to heroin when Oxy stopped working, a rather common occurrence in this type of gateway of addiction. With thoughts of his little sister always looming, Jake begins the high stakes bust of a dangerous criminal who is responsible for sneaking drugs across the border between the U.S and Canada.

The third story, in this three prong story, follows Evangeline Lily as Claire. On the surface, Claire is a loving mother to her 15 year old son, Derrick (Duke Nicholson) and a successful architect. Under the surface however, Claire is an addict. Years earlier she’d become dependent on Oxycontin and nearly died. She survived and got clean and left drugs behind so that she could be there for Derrick for his whole life. However, when Derrick is killed by the same drug syndicate that Jake is investigating, Claire spirals out of control, wavering between suicide and killing the men who murdered her son.

There isn’t much dovetailing between the three stories in Crisis. Gary Oldman’s Professor Brower is completely cut off from Armie Hammer and Evangeline Lilly’s stories, while Hammer and Lilly’s, Jake and Claire, unite late in the movie but otherwise have no direct contact. The reason to keep these stories separate is to make it more plausible. If they had united all three stories in the end it would have felt forced and contrived.

Instead, director Nicholas Jarecki tells three stories to gather the scope and scale of the corruption at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry. Each of the three stories are the grist in a mill in the manufacturing of addiction and the corruption that perpetuates the problem in pursuit of profits. Crisis is like a chain with each character a link in the chain of corruption, addiction, and even murder.

We start at the bottom as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police track down and arrest a young drug runner. That bust nearly destroys another bust being built toward by Armie Hammer’s DEA Agent. The arrest then leads to the bad guys murdering Elaine’s son and leading her back toward the drugs she’d been previously addicted to. Closer to the top of the chain you have Luke Evans as a corporate executive who is trying to pay Gary Oldman’s researcher and professor to look the other way after a billion dollar new pain pill proves to have potentially horrific side effects.

That pill will, one day in the future, become one of the drugs that starts a brand new addiction business that the DEA will one day have to break up and arrest and the cycle starts all over again with a whole new chain being manufactured in the cold hard pursuit of profit. Here, Jarecki overplays his hand just a little. The big Pharma villains are a tad too over the top in their villainy. If Evans and his boss, played by Veronica Ferres, were to start cackling over the sound of thunder on the soundtrack while twirling comical silent movie mustaches, you might not be that surprised, the movie lays it on thick here.

Better is the performance from Greg Kinnear as the head of the University that employs Oldman’s professor. Having made many compromises in his career to do what good can be done by a University President, you can sense the heartache he feels at having to side with the corporate money people over his principled colleague and friend. Kinnear wears the weight of his own corruption, especially in a particularly good scene late in the movie.

Other members of this terrific ensemble cast are rapper Kid Cudi as a good guy FDA functionary trying to do the right thing and Mia Kushner as Claire’s suspicious but caring sister. Claire's sister is very worried that whatever happened to her nephew may have been because her sister is back on drugs and the relationship is fraught with trust issues. In just a couple of scenes, these two actors do a wonderful job of rounding out their characters.

Crisis is far from flawless, it has a preachy quality and Nicholas Jarecki at times twists and bends his story to its breaking point to make simple points about how corporate greed is bad and doing the right thing is good. He's not wrong but the movie could stand for a little more nuance. That said, the strain doesn’t show too much and certainly not enough to ruin the whole of Crisis which, at its core, is a well intentioned, well made, Hollywood drama. The heart of Crisis is very much in the right place and that goes a long way to making it worth a look.

Crisis is a valuable educational tool in dramatically illustrating the ongoing and deadly opioid crisis and how it continues to be perpetuated by a profit over safety approach to drug making. Crisis is a polemic and a pointed one but it’s also well acted by an all star ensemble that appears engaged and passionate about the subject. Crisis will be in theaters on February 26th and On Demand rental services will have the movie in March.

Side note: This review was written after all that came out regarding star Armie Hammer. I have nothing to say about his particular scandal as I don’t know what is true and what is not. Go into the movie knowing he’s in it and you can decide for yourself if that’s a trigger for you. I don’t know Hammer personally and I don’t know that he’s committed any crimes other than being a serious creep. You decide if that overwhelms his talent as an actor. I do love the tasty coincidence of Hammer starring in a movie called Crisis just as his career as reached a crisis point.