Delayed Reaction: 13 Lives

Premise: The true story of the herculean effort made to rescue a Thai junior football club and their coach from a flooded cave.

 

I hate to be a “you should read the book instead” guy, but you should really watch the documentary on this story (The Rescue) instead. Normally speaking, I see the reason for there to be a documentary and a dramatic feature of a story like this. Think of Man on Wire and The Walk. Man on Wire gives all the context and reassures you that this story is real. The Walk brings it to life. The Walk had a lot of problems, but they were all worth it to see the walk reproduced on screen in a way Man on Wire simply couldn’t. The problem with this Thai rescue story is that the documentary covers all of that. It explains all the context I need about the men involved in the rescue, the specialty of the task, and the insanity of the plan. AND it restages parts of the rescue so that the doc is also a thrilling watch. So, what’s left for 13 Lives? Not much, sadly.

 

The movie is ok. Maybe it plays better if you haven’t seen The Rescue already. Ron Howard is a technically proficient director and restages a lot the rescue and other assorted dives well. The movie looks good. Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton do their best “Norm-core” impressions. It’s a weird problem the movie has. The men doing the dives are really unassuming. They don’t look like highly skilled divers. They look like middle-aged men who still talk about that time they got SCUBA certified on vacation. So, casting movie stars to play them obscures that. I’d expect mountain divers to be physical specimens. Casting Aragorn, Alexander the Great, and Brendan Conlon from Warrior makes sense. What’s hard to make clear in the movie is that they are actually casting Tony Lip from Green Book, David from The Lobster, and Richard Loving from Loving. It’s a tiny point to make, but it’s definitely something that got lost in translation here.

 

Ron Howard does his best Paul Greengrass impression in this. He keeps the sentimentality down and really focuses on how technical it all is. The rescue itself takes place for over an hour of the film. That’s a lot of commitment to process, and he’s cutting in with the work people are doing to divert the flooding. The movie does a great job of showing how much real effort from all over the globe went into this. Just because The Rescue did it better doesn’t mean I think 13 Lives did it poorly. This is an entertaining, slightly long, harrowing but hopeful movie made by a lot of people who know what they are doing.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend