Studio-financed dramas based on real-life heroism stories are a dime a dozen. We’ve all seen a million of them and pretty much know beat-for-beat how they operate, which is pretty much the same way all Hollywood blockbusters operate. (“Here comes the part where the handsome white man beats impossible odds and saves everyone!”) One always hopes, when one of these incredible-true-story cash-ins comes along, that the filmmakers seize the opportunity they’re given and actually do something interesting and artful.

Regrettably, the opportunity is typically squandered, and such is the case with The Finest Hours, a decent dramatization that’s too restrained and measured to be interesting. A product of Disney, the Craig Gillespie-directed thriller is inspired by the efforts of a handful of Bostonian U.S. Coast Guard rescuers who save around thirty men from a ravaged oil tanker in the middle of the stormy North Atlantic. Such a story sets the foundation for the bevy of visual effects teams to go absolutely ham with digital rain and pummelling waves and sweeping views of raging sea storms. The CGI maelstrom indeed looks pretty impressive, but it’s all stuff we’ve seen before in other, better movies of the same ilk. Plus, oddly enough, despite the chaos surrounding our plucky heroes, it never quite feels like they’re in all that much danger.

In February 1952, an oil tanker was literally ripped in two by a winter storm off the coast of Boston, prompting the Coast Guard to deploy a sizeable team of their best to search for survivors. In a cruel twist of fate, a second tanker in the area, the SS Pendleton, was split in half as well. With the Coast Guard crew’s numbers severely diminished, just four men are sent on a small motorboat to somehow navigate the crushing, freezing waters and locate the Pendleton and its survivors.

They’re led by Bernie Webber, played by an unexpectedly wooden Chris Pine. Webber’s a man’s man, but he’s shy and mildly awkward, socially. Pine doesn’t find any depth within the character, which is a disappointment, though his co-stars feel similarly docile (Ben Foster, playing one of the four rag-taggers, is also uncharacteristically sleepy in his performance). Half of the movie follows what’s left of the Pendleton crew, a collection of archetypes embodied, again, by talented actors seemingly on cruise control. Casey Affleck plays the crew’s impromptu leader, Raymond Sybert, a sort of ship whisperer who devises clever plans to keep the Pendleton afloat until help comes. Raymond, like Bernie, is a softspoken outcast of sorts, their respective journeys parallel and largely flavorless.

We don’t know much about Raymond’s background, but we learn a lot about Bernie’s in the film’s open, which flashes back to the meet-cute between he and his sweetheart, Miriam (Holliday Grainger, who has the lovely look of a classic Hollywood starlet). When Bernie’s out on his impossible rescue mission, we occasionally check in on Miriam, who’s worried into a frenzy, taking much of her frustration out on Bernie’s commanding officer (Eric Bana). Grainger’s gifted, and maybe the nicest thing about the movie is that she’s given ample time to explore Miriam’s different colors of desperation and anger and denial.

The Finest Hours‘ issues really boil down to the fact that it moves forward in such a sleepy fashion that the stakes seem to evaporate into nothing as we watch the actors navigate the uninventive script (by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson) without any vigor or enthusiasm. The generic, sweeping score is relentless in how it dictates the tone of the scenes before the camera or the actors are given a chance to, which is another added frustration. It’s an incredibly bloodless affair, and the ending is so protracted and full of pointless, long stares that I was absolutely itching for the thing to be over.

The Bronx is turned into a funhouse of jump scares and buddy cop banter in Deliver Us From Evil, a loose adaptation of Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie, a former NYPD detective who left the force to enter the creepy world of demonology. Fans of the exorcism subgenre of horror will no doubt get what they came for in the film’s conclusion, one of the most overblown, silliest exorcism scenes in movies, but the derivative cheap thrills leading up to it barely warrant the wait.

The scare-fest comes to us from Sinister director Scott Derrickson and stars Eric Bana as Sarchie, a badass cop who has a “heavy hand” when dealing with criminals, has always been haunted by the gruesome crimes he deals with on the streets. But lately, he’s been experiencing flashes of deathly visions and strange noises no one else can hear, haunting him more literally. The “true story” element lends little authenticity to the terror, since the film is so chockfull of genre tropes you’ll be struck more by its resemblance to similar hokey horror romps than its resemblance to real life.

Sarchie’s visions (represented by quick flashes of disgusting things, the lamest kind of scare tactic) stem from an ancient evil brought to the Bronx from Iraq by a group of soldiers who discover evil looking Latin inscriptions in a cave, as is seen in the film’s prologue. Sarchie teams up with his wisecracking, knife-savvy partner (Joel McHale) and a boozer priest with a sordid past and paranormal experience (Edgar Ramirez) to take down Santino (Sean Harris), the leader of the soldiers who is now spreading his dark juju throughout the city under the guise of a friendly painting company.

From the eerily quiet, moonlit Bronx Zoo to dark, messy apartments with cat carcasses splayed out on the wall, Sarchie and his buddies investigate the developing mystery by searching the spookiest spots in the city, flashlights and guns at the ready. The barrage of occult symbolism, possessed stuffed animals, possessed real animals, and possessed human beings is standard fare, and it’s all decent fun. Prolonged silence punctuated by a loud noise and terrible sight, the most classic horror tool, is utilized well by Derrickson, who clearly did his homework in Scary Movies 101. The atmosphere is menacing and the scares, while a bit overly “jumpy”, are potent, but fans of the genre will find little novelty here aside from Derrickson using music from The Doors to give otherwise clichéd sequences a thin veil of originality.

At first, Sarchie is skeptical, quick to believe that he’s losing his mind rather than acknowledge the presence of a supernatural power. But with his visions become more vivid and disturbing, he has a hear-to-heart with the priest that opens his eyes to the possibility that throughout his life of fighting crime, he’s only been dealing with “secondary evil”, and that what threatens him now is a “primary evil” that exists beyond our realm of reality. Sarchie becomes so entangled with his ghostbusting work that he neglects his wife (Olivia Munn) and young daughter, who predictably become the targets of big bad Santino.

Bana, always a class act, plays Sarchie with grit and passion, wearing a convincing New York accent to boot.  McHale and Ramirez have less to work with, though the roles accentuate their strengths as actors well. The film’s bloated final exorcism, which takes place in a police interrogation room that gets torn to bits by supernatural forces, is rightly bonkers but overstays its welcome due to a formulaic presentation consisting of odd contortions, splitting skin, oozing blood, and other cheesy CG effects. Derrickson fails to convince us that his film is anything more than a run-of-the-mill creep show, but at the very least it delivers scares aplenty.

Deliver Us From Evil trailer