Plot: Boston Detective Frank Shaw returns to duty after a career-altering injury leaves him with permanent hearing loss. Tasked with interpreting for Ava Fremont (Sandra Mae Frank), a deaf witness to a brutal gang murder, they find themselves cornered in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building when the killers return to eliminate her. Cut off from the outside world; these two strangers must lean on each other to outsmart killers they can’t hear coming for their only hope of making it out alive.
Review: Joel Kinnaman has a trend going on these days with his role selection. After starring in last year’s John Woo action flick Silent Night, in which he portrayed a man who loses the ability to speak and goes on a vengeance-fueled rampage, Kinnaman is next headlining The Silent Hour, in which he plays a man who loses the ability to hear. While Silent Night benefited from John Woo’s eye for balletic action, The Silent Hour is closer to something we would expect Liam Neeson to star in. Set predominantly in a single apartment building, The Silent Hour wants to stand out from other formulaic action movies with a protagonist who uses a disability as a superpower, but aside from a solid supporting role from Sandra Mae Frank, The Silent Hour is boring and woefully lacking in any sort of energy.
The Silent Hour opens with Detective Frank Shaw (Joel Kinnaman) enjoying all of the sonic wonders of his life: jazz music, a coffee maker percolating, and all of the world’s noises outside of his apartment. Shaw meets up with his partner, Doug Slater (Mark Strong), to take down a suspect. The guy does not go quietly, leading Shaw on a chase through shipping containers. Shaw listens closely to pinpoint where the suspect is before eventually catching him just as Shaw runs into a car and falls, hitting his head on the ground. Fast-forwarding six months later, Shaw is suffering from hearing loss. He struggles to hear anything, and his hearing adds to the deadening of the world around him. Depressed, the divorced dad cannot even bring himself to attend his daughter’s band recital. Shaw’s partner comes to the rescue and brings him in to help question a deaf witness since the department interpreter is unavailable. Shaw and Slater head to see Ava Fremont (Sandra Mae Frank), who witnessed a murder.
The cops go their separate ways after Shaw and Slater finish, but not before Shaw realizes he has forgotten his phone at Ava’s apartment. He returns to find Mason Lynch (Mekhi Phifer), the dirty cop who Ava witnessed commit the murder, attempting to silence her by faking an overdose. Shaw steps in to rescue Ava, and the pair heads on the run through the apartment building to try to survive. Ava, born deaf, must help Frank come to terms with his injury-induced hearing loss, and together, the two plan to escape and stop Lynch and his cronies from getting away with their crimes. Early on, I expected The Silent Hour to play like a twist on the Dredd and The Raid formula of the apartment building being a caged-in setting full of bad guys and escapes, but the story never really takes advantage of the location. Instead, much of the film shows Shaw making bumbling mistakes like stepping on bubble wrap or not remembering that he cannot hear as he tries to call for help. It borders on ludicrous at the best of times and sloppy writing the rest. The action is usually the bad cops shooting at the good cops as the characters use fire escapes and window ledges to move from one apartment to the next.
For a film with as solid of a cast as this, The Silent Hour wastes virtually everyone’s talent. Joel Kinnaman has played a cop so many times that he barely needs to try and emulate law enforcement, but Frank Shaw is so fixated on his hearing loss that it feels like a crutch to force the story along. In contrast, Sandra Mae Frank, who is actually deaf, does a great job playing a woman struggling with her own demons as she tries to stay alive, which now includes trying to make Shaw feel better about his recent hearing loss. Mark Strong is good but underused, while Mekhi Phifer spends more time as a mustache-twirling bad guy who runs around doing nothing, so it feels like they could have cast anyone in the role and saved a paycheck. The film never uses the talent at its disposal to deliver action that rises above shooting around corners or the tension of maybe someone hearing someone else walking around. It comes across as repetitive and just boring.
It is a shame since director Brad Anderson has made several films I have loved, including Session 9, The Machinist, and Trans-Siberian. His last decade of work has been hit or miss, with Beirut starring Jon Hamm a bright spot amongst multiple forgettable genre offerings. Anderson has always had an eye for atmospheric and moody productions, but the Canadian-filmed The Silent Hour has nothing distinctive about it. Based on a script by Dan Hall, I think Anderson tried to salvage some sort of entertainment value from this mess of a story but is left with a plug-and-play template used dozens of times every year with weaker actors in the cast. With Kinnaman and Strong, I had thought this movie could have been at least a casual watch, if not a great one, but it barely registers anything above mediocre at its best moments.
The Silent Hour is neither good enough to consider for a hate-watch nor is it bad enough to be awfully good. Despite a great filmmaker and two capable leading actors, the only worthwhile takeaway from The Silent Hour is the talented Sandra Mae Frank, who should be considered for bigger and better roles in the future. There is no action to speak of in this action movie, leaving it as a drama-less dramatic film. I would say there is an audience for this movie out there somewhere, but that would have to be categorized as Kinnaman or Strong completists who need to check off their Letterboxd viewing requirement as having seen all of the films by either actor.
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