THE DESPERATE HOUR (2021)

Studio:     Vertical Entertainment
Director:    Phillip Noyce
Writer:     Christopher Sparling
Producer:  Andrew D. Corkin, Christopher Sparling, Alex Lalonde, Zack Schiller, David Boies, Naomi Watts, Chris Parker, Dylan Sellers
Stars:     Naomi Watts

Review Score:

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Summary:

When a shooter takes hostages at a high school, a desperate mother races to rescue her teenage son.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Still grieving the death of her husband Peter one year ago, single mother Amy Carr sees her young daughter Emily off to elementary school. She then tries to have a moment with her distant and depressed teenage son Noah, but Noah dismisses Amy as well as her suggestion to get out of bed and go to school.

Amy goes for a long run in the woods. While jogging, Amy makes and takes various phone calls with her boss Greg Minor, Mrs. Sandra Fischer at her daughter’s elementary school, her mother, her friend Heather Euclid, a contractor, and a mechanic named CJ at an auto body shop.

An emergency alert warns Amy of a shooting at her son’s high school. Amy repeatedly tries to call Noah, but her messages and texts go unanswered.

Amy calls 911. Operator Dedra Wilkinson advises Amy to get to a staging location for concerned parents at a community center. Unable to find an available ride among her friends, Amy begins jogging to the location but sprains her ankle.

Through a series of phone calls with previous contacts, Amy confirms Noah’s truck is at the school, indicating he did leave the house after all. Since his auto body shop is near the police barricade, CJ acts as Amy’s eyes and ears at the scene, and he tells Amy that the police are searching Noah’s truck.

Amy trips and hits her head on a rock. Continuing to walk while dizzy, Amy begins wondering if her son is the shooter. 911 operator Dedra puts Amy in contact with Detective Ed Paulson. Although the detective refuses to provide concrete information, he asks questions about firearms and mental health that imply Noah could be the shooter. Amy leaves another message for Noah asking him to stop if what the authorities are saying is true.

CJ calls to tell Amy that the police are searching additional vehicles. Noah also calls with a plea for help before being cut off by a commotion.

Amy calls Dedra at 911 to tell her about Noah’s call. Detective Paulson confirms Noah is not the shooter. Paulson explains that Noah and the shooter are among five people barricaded inside the high school’s chemistry lab. However, Paulson refuses to reveal anyone’s identity.

Amy calls CJ to get the license plates of the other cars being searched by police. Using his auto database, CJ subsequently texts Amy with the registration info for each vehicle.

Amy calls Heather and asks to speak to her daughter McKenzie, who safely evacuated the high school. McKenzie recognizes all of the names Amy asks about except Robert John Ellis.

Amy calls her boss Greg at his tax office. Amy convinces Greg to look up Robert’s tax records in order to obtain his phone number. Amy also learns Robert used to work in the high school’s cafeteria.

A Lyft driver she called previously finally finds Amy on a forest road. During her ride toward the school, Amy checks Robert’s social media accounts and confirms he is unstable.

Amy calls Robert directly. Amy identifies herself as a hostage’s mother, but Robert suspects she is working with the police. Amy pleads for the lives of the hostages and offers to help before the call cuts off. Paulson calls Amy to admonish her for contacting Robert, and warns her not to call him again.

Amy calls 911. Paulson joins Amy’s conversation with Dedra. Paulson explains that Robert abruptly stopped all negotiations, so the police now need Amy to distract him while a SWAT team breaches the chemistry lab. Amy does as asked, but Robert cuts off her call again.

Amy arrives at the school. Noah calls Amy. Amy is on the phone with her son as the raid happens and multiple shots are heard. Noah’s call cuts off. Although initially concerned her son might be dead, police safely escort Noah across the barricade to reunite with his mother.

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Review:

A fast, and accurate, way to summarize “The Desperate Hour” is: 80 minutes of Naomi Watts jogging through a forest while fearing the worst for her son, who is trapped in an active school shooting. For a busy critic, a simple setup like this appears appealing because it doesn’t demand the time or attention of, say, a three-hour period piece about a British coal miner during the ministry of Margaret Thatcher. “Uncomplicated” is a bullet point anyone looking for a “get in, get out” movie can get behind. Needing only enough crew to film one woman running, an undemanding design certainly speaks to why people would want to produce such a threadbare thriller. “The Desperate Hour’s” problem though, is that its pedestrian simplicity quickly becomes dreadfully dull and entirely deflated of any suspense.

“The Desperate Hour” opens with Amy (Naomi Watts) going through her morning meditation, which can’t quite quell the memory of a car crash cutting through her calm. Amy rolls over to stare longingly at a bedside photo of a man instantly identified by Amy’s saddened sigh as a dead husband. Her grief too great, a maudlin guitar riff echoes as Amy texts her boss to take a personal day. She then rounds out her routine by standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee while her young daughter Emily boards a school bus, and rides off to never be seen or matter to the movie again.

It’s like looking directly into the life of an ordinary single mother in mourning… if that mother was built specifically for a movie, and everything essential about her only exists for the purposes of the plot.

Next we meet Amy’s moody teenage son. When Amy calls his name, Noah responds with no more noise than a half-hearted “unh.” A piece of furniture bars his bedroom door because he can’t be bothered. Dirty clothes litter his floor because he just doesn’t care. And when mom optimistically proposes family movie night, Noah turns his shoulder with an annoyed harrumph so Amy can look at the back of his head instead of his frowning face on the front.

It’s like having a window directly into the sympathetic life of a troubled teen… if that teen was constructed from the same clichés used for every other angst-riddled high-schooler ever featured in filmed fiction.

With its two main mopers established in the most commonplace ways imaginable, “The Desperate Hour” moves on to the meat of its material: Amy jogging. Drone shots of Amy jogging. Crane shots of Amy jogging. Steadicam shots of Amy jogging. Dolly shots of Amy jogging. Handheld shots of Amy jogging. I think there may even be an angle of Amy jogging shot from the phone in the palm of her hand.

To break up the monotony of what becomes one big running montage, Amy makes and takes a few phone calls over her earbuds. First she chooses songs for her playlist. Then comes a call from her boss. Amy ignores one call from her mother, but picks up a second one to make arrangements for a body shop stop. Either before or after picking up the car, Amy will also have to pick up a piece of pottery her daughter forgot for an art show. Amy informs a friend she has a contractor coming over to fix a wall too. Throughout the hamster wheel run through these yawn-inducing conversations, Amy never once mentions that she has such a razor-thin characterization, this blah-blah blather fills up the runtime without ever filling out her personality.

Before we can forget the main thing the movie wants us to know about her, Amy pauses to stare longingly at a picture of her dead husband again. It’s a different photo from last time, although the actor sports the same clothes since the still photo team probably only had him for one short shoot. Or maybe Amy only has one happy memory of him.

Once Amy finally finds out about the active shooter lockdown at her son’s school, “The Desperate Hour” cycles through scene after scene of Amy futilely trying to call Noah only for her impassioned pleas for a safety check to go straight to voicemail. Okay, yes. Amy is a terrified mother doing precisely what any panicking parent would do in her situation. But “The Desperate Hour” presents itself as thrill-based entertainment, not a ripped-from-reality documentary. Watching Amy repeatedly encounter the roadblock of messages going unanswered is about as riveting as watching a dead rat decay.

This entire sequence essentially amounts to 15 minutes of Amy trying to find out if her son even got out of bed and went to school in the first place. That’s 15 minutes without any tension whatsoever for the audience, because we’re merely waiting for her to confirm what we already know. Yes, he’s inside the school, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.

Spinning its wheels for other ways to draw out drama, “The Desperate Hour” next has Amy go through a spell of wondering whether her troubled son might be the gunman. However, “The Desperate Hour” completely cops out of a thoughtful or challenging examination of how or why a parent might go through this chain of thought. Prior to considering her son could be a killer, Amy falls and smacks her head on a rock. Amy’s subsequent dizziness suggests the only reason she’d think the worst of Noah is due to her mind being momentarily muddled, and then manipulated by a detective who reinforces that suspicion.

Beyond those problematic insinuations, the possibility of Noah being the shooter doesn’t do anything to throw off an audience who knows this isn’t a movie about a mother talking her homicidal son off a ledge. So once again we’re stuck in a stretch where the story has no suspense at all.

Until the final few minutes, Amy’s only objective is to find a way back to town. She’s not going to the school to save her son. She’s actually going to a staging area for concerned parents at a community center where she won’t be able to do anything anyway. So why would anyone bite their nails over whether Amy waits out the shooting in the woods or waits it out on the other side of a police barricade? “The Desperate Hour” does something dippy so Amy becomes directly involved in the outcome, except before then, her countdown clock for getting out of the forest doesn’t carry any real consequences.

The shooter turns out to be barely a boogeyman and more of a MacGuffin. We can make an assumption from the climax’s commotion, but the film doesn’t even confirm his fate, though that in itself confirms how tertiary he is to the story.

School shootings are touchy subjects, of course. I’ve seen some people categorize “The Desperate Hour” as being “insincere” about exploitive melodrama and messaging, particularly with a cloying epilogue that’s as tacky as it is tacked-on, as though the film only has a bare minimum afterthought to acknowledge the seriousness of its subject matter.

Affording the benefit of the doubt, maybe “The Desperate Hour” means well. The movie simply doesn’t have the substance to create high-stakes suspense, much less sustain it. But if you’re fine with a feature film’s worth of Naomi Watts walking and talking in front of trees, trees, and more trees, “The Desperate Hour” features more footage of her looking worried while running than anyone with limited patience for pat plotting can handle.

Review Score: 35

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