Out of the Furnace

December 16, 2013 0 By Fans
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Plot

When Rodney Baze mysteriously disappears and law enforcement fails to follow through, his older brother, Russell, takes matters into his own hands to find justice.

Release Year: 2013

Rating: 7.1/10 (566 voted)

Director: Scott Cooper

Storyline

Russell and his younger brother Rodney live in the economically-depressed Rust Belt, and have always dreamed of escaping and finding better lives. But when a cruel twist of fate lands Russell in

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Taglines:
Sometimes your battles choose you.



Details

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Filming Locations: Braddock, Pennsylvania, USA



Technical Specs

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Did You Know?

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The Make a Wish Foundation brought a boy who wished to meet Christian Bale to the set, and he and his family were able to spend the day with the cast and crew. See more »



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Film's that seek to contemplate ideas on injustice or venture the
blackest hidden fissures of society that influence the health of the
human psyche certainly take on the risky but potentially rewarding task
of making the purely bleak into something poetically involving. This
seems to be the driving force behind the intention of director Scott
Cooper's sophomore directorial effort, co-written by Brad Inglesby and
Cooper himself, who is just coming off the high of obtaining Jeff
Bridges an Oscar from his first feature Crazy Heart, the alcoholic
slanted country singing film closely related to Tender Mercies. It's
clear that Cooper is a student of cinema and his clear intention with
Out of the Furnace was to capture the turbulent bleakness that was
evident in the tone of reflective cinema in the 70s, such as the war,
post-war, and employment struggles of say Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter,
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and Hal Ashby's Coming Home, and
applying their societal criticism through amplified drama in a film
that tackles symptoms of the modern American nightmare. This film is
also a frigidly bleak combination of a neo-war and neo-western that
intended to contemplate the American tendency of descending into
violence through desperate claims for retribution in the face of
injustice. However, intention doesn't often find a link to effective
drama and poetic engagement because the debilitating aspect to Cooper's
latest film is the fact that it begins in uncomfortable morbidity and
never leaves it lingering on a downward spiral of depressing
occurrences keeping the film flat lining until a semi-rewarding final
half hour. The assumption held within the incessantly bleak Out of the
Furnace is that unfortunate circumstances themselves equal audience
sympathy for oddly subtle semi- developed characters hoping that the
utilization of weighty melodrama and overt depictions of modern
societal ills pummels you into histrionic submission. There's something
to be admired in Scott Cooper's ambition to tackle dark themes that
attempt to depict a portrait of damaged humanity amidst what he sees as
societal degradation but it seems his promising talent and the definite
promise of powerful performances from a cast of exceptional actors just
goes to waste as his eerily silent yet questionably confused ending
comes to a steady halt. Out of the Furnace has the cinematic qualities
of a reflective film of the 70s, including grainy cinematography and an
uneasy yet powerful complimentary score, and while it attempts to be
thematically high concept it lands flat through its unrelenting
cynicism that possibly could have succeeded in a more matured
director's hands.