Crisis movie review: Armie Hammer’s scandal hangs over drug thriller

The last thing a movie wants is for its lead star to implode his own career thanks to a series of controversies and allegations.

There’s no getting past the elephant in the room. The scandal-plagued, six-foot-four elephant who may or may not consider cannibalistic proclivities as a part of his seduction repertoire.

In the two months since the revelations of Armie Hammer’s controversial texts and social media posts and allegations of abuse, he’s been persona non grata in the industry, dropped by his agents and parted from upcoming projects.

But there’s little to be done if Hammer’s roles are already filmed, edited and ready to be released – such as his starring role in the uneven drug trafficking drama Crisis. There is he, right at the centre of the poster, sandwiched between Gary Oldman and Evangeline Lilly.

There’s no hiding him in a large ensemble as he inevitably will be when Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie mystery Death on the Nile is released later this year.

Crisis has no choice but to own the Armie Hammer-ness of it all – not that you can really blame writer and director Nicholas Jarecki, who probably wasn’t warned his SAG Award-nominated leading star was going to implode his own career right about the time of release.

So, let’s get it out of the way. Hammer is fine in Crisis, mostly. His performance is so serious and earnest, you find yourself thinking less about his off-screen drama and more about why he’s increasingly overplaying so many scenes.

Armie Hammer’s off-screen scandal is the elephant in the room. Picture: Philippe Bosse

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That also pretty much sums up Crisis as a whole – mostly fine with a penchant for overwrought theatrics. It’s the kind of movie that, if you pressed play on a long-haul flight (yeah, remember those?), it would’ve been an OK accompaniment to that mediocre airline meal, a way to pass a couple of forgettable hours.

Which is not to slight Crisis’s noble aims, a triptych of stories that highlight how the opioid epidemic is wreaking damage across American society, in the manner of Steven Soderbergh’s superior 2000 movie Traffic.

Put that in a logline and you understand why Oldman (who is also a producer), Lilly and an absolutely stacked supporting cast including Luke Evans, Michelle Rodriguez, Greg Kinnear, Kid Cudi, Lily-Rose Depp, Mia Kirshner, Indira Varma and Martin Donovan signed up.

In Hammer’s storyline, he’s an undercover federal agent trying to set up a massive drug buy between an Armenian syndicate in Michigan and the Canadian gangsters importing fentanyl from Asia. The assignment is dangerous, but he has personal skin in the game.

Lilly plays a recovering oxy addict who once slammed her hand in her car door just to get another prescription. When her teenage son is found dead, presumably from an overdose, she’s convinced there’s something else at play.

Evangeline Lilly as a grieving mother looking for answers. Picture: Philippe Bosse

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And then you have Oldman’s branch of the film, where he plays an academic at a mid-level university whose research has been funded by a large pharmaceutical company.

When his findings about the latest “miracle” drug that purports to be addiction-free disputes that of the company, it sets off a chain in which he has to choose between his family, security and reputation or his ethics and commitment to scientific truth.

Each storyline has its own merits and entertainment value, but it all feels very been-there-done-that rather than revealing or fresh. The Oldman versus big pharma element is a reminder that not all the crooks stand on street corners or put a literal gun to your head, while Lilly’s depiction of the grieving mother has the most effective emotional anchor.

There’s no doubt that the opioid crisis has cost an abominable amount of lives in the US and here in Australia, and any storytelling that strives to be multifaceted and not just demonising, helps to destigmatise those thought caught within its vicious cycle.

But for all of its good intentions, the generic Crisis isn’t showing us anything new.

Rating: 2.5/5

Crisis is in cinemas now

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