Crisis Review

[Westside Steve]

Crisis

Quiver

PG-13             118 min

 

There are few actors I will always go to see in a starring role. There are some,  for example Sean Connery, whose pure charisma transforms whatever character they're playing into themselves and there  as others who transform themselves into a completely unique character. Gary Oldman is in that second group and in my opinion one of the best of all time. He's run the gamut disappearing into such roles as Sid Vicious and Dracula and now Tyrone Brower, a milquetoast college professor/ scientific researcher in charge of a lucrative but shady study of a cutting-edge narcotic in line for FDA approval. The drug itself has been billed as more effective than oxy and much less addictive which will surely mean billions upon billions for the company. Here's where one of the first inconsistencies pops up. With only days to go before approval dr. Brewers team finds out a disturbing occurrence in a study involving mice. Apparently on rodents the drug works great in the first 7 days but if usage is prolonged until 10 the addiction is more severe than oxy or even morphine and laboratory is now littered with dead mice. (It seems like that would have been found out months ago, right?) Now does that necessarily mean the results will translate exactly into humans? Who knows but I thought they would have found this out years before in the preliminary studies given the 7-10-day range? Anyway... the doctor's report meets with pretty severe backlash, threats and even blackmail from not only the company but the college who needs the research money.

Storyline number two. There are drugs a lot worse than oxycodone and one of them is fake oxycodone made with fentanyl much more addictive much stronger and much deadlier. Being more concentrated it's also much easier to smuggle. Crisis opens with a young man smuggling a load of fentanyl-based pills for a Montréal-based kingpin called Mother. Mother's adversary is a Straight Arrow drug cop Jack Kelly (Armie Hammer) who has gone undercover to break up the cartel. Kelly's sister is a hopeless drug addict so he has an extra axe to grind.  Plus, there’s a romantic hook. Remember the dead kid from early in the movie? Well, he just happens to have an attractive mother and coincidentally, another goal of agent Kelly is to find out who killed him

 I guess the idea of this film is to try to bridge the gap between social commentary and action film which reminded me a little bit of THE INSIDER the Russell Crowe film about the tobacco industry. The idea there was to make the tobacco companies seem as evil as al-Qaida and that's the treatment big pharm gets here.  I actually have no idea how accurate portrayals are but keep in mind that cigarettes and oxycodone are still perfectly legal. To be honest the action is hard to come by until the very end. Because of that I had it grating out is a C  for most of the film but by the decent cop show climax it climbed up to a C.

WSS