Crisis: Drama About the Opioid Calamity Less Intense than Real Headlines
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B-
It’s hard to fault writer/director Nicholas Jarecki for failing to make audiences shiver with indignation watching Crisis, his dramatic overview of the very real opioid epidemic and some heroic and insidious actors behind it.
When stories are torn from the headlines, the headlines are sometimes more chilling. And the by-now-familiar tale of Purdue Pharma’s deliberate and duplicitous solicitation of doctors to abundantly prescribe OxyContin— sparking the current crisis Stateside and beyond, updating big tobacco’s sinister playbook in the process — is a horror show so consuming and multifaceted that an alternate, quasi-fictional take on the situation feels comparatively flat.
It’s not for lack of trying as Crisis has a terrific ensemble cast doing terrific work. But the film never sparks or soars.
Crisis follows three separate but parallel narratives linked to the opioid scourge and touching on its institutional, ethical, legal and human aspects. Foremost is the story of Gary Oldman’s Dr. Tyrone Brower, a stand-up researcher and professor whose work is richly funded by Luke Evans’ big pharma, Northlight.
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A new and ostensibly non-addictive painkiller is showing very different, very troubling results in Brower’s lab than Northlight claims, but whistleblowing would almost certainly halt critical funding, a point tirelessly driven home to Brower by his boss, played with appropriate snivel by Greg Kinnear.
Meanwhile, Armie Hammer’s law enforcement officer Jake Kelly is hot on the trail of smugglers on either side of the U.S./Canada border (the film was shot in Montreal and is generous with its Canadian references). Kelly is working undercover in the hope of bringing down some key players and he has skin in the game; his sister (Lily-Rose Depp) is in recovery.
And there’s Evangeline Lilly’s Claire, herself a recovering addict and Detroit-based mother whose son David, she slowly and agonizingly discovers, has gotten mixed up with drugs and the dirtbags in their midst. Michelle Rodriguez also appears in this starry cast as a DEA boss.
Jarecki, best known for 2012’s Arbitrage with Richard Gere, does create some exhilarating moments, as when Brower’s researchers break down for him their rigorous study of the new drug and its devastating impact on lab mice.
Here, a standard seven-day trial is extended to 10 days to yield more data which it does with disturbing results — possibly a nod to Purdue’s own responsibility workaround, which put the onus for OxyContin abuse on users who found ways to bypass the drug’s time-release delay. But still, we’ve seen this one before, and for real.
Crisis is a story that should feel urgent and itchy, but instead feels perfunctory and painfully familiar. Maybe there’s just no way to best the truth when the truth is so much stranger, sadder — and more diabolical — than fiction could ever be.
Crisis. Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki. Starring Gary Oldman, Lily-Rose Depp, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, Armie Hammer, and Kid Cudi. On digital and on-demand platforms on March 16.