Movie review: Not exactly smooth sailing for ‘The Finest Hours’

“The Finest Hours,” based on the true story of the valiant 1952 Coast Guard rescue of a sinking oil tanker off the coast of Massachusetts, splits in two much like the wounded vessel at its heart.

There’s the film that’s set on the sea, and much of that is pretty terrific, even if it brings to mind “A Perfect Storm.” And then there’s the film set on land. That one runs aground.

Chris Pine is Bernie Webber, a young Coast Guardsman whose daily routine is upended when he’s tasked with heading up a team to save the 30-plus crew from the Pendleton, a wreck drifting in the storm-tossed waters during a vicious winter nor’easter.

Webber and his equally young cohorts – Richard (Ben Foster), Andy (Kyle Gallner, “American Sniper”) and Ervin (John Magaro, “The Big Short”) – are the JV squad as the more seasoned sailors have already left to help another ship in distress. But their commanding officer (Eric Bana, whose Southern accent is nearly as much of a disaster as the Pendleton) has no choice but to send them out.

Meanwhile, aboard the Pendleton, the captain and much of the crew have been killed, and now it’s up to reclusive but knowledgeable chief engineer Ray Sybert (a good Casey Affleck) to take command of what’s left and try to keep everyone alive until help arrives.

These scenes provide the film with its most suspenseful and rewarding moments and seem to be the ones where director Craig Gillespie (“Million Dollar Arm,” “Lars and the Real Girl”) shows the most inspiration.

There’s one sequence where orders are being quickly relayed from one crew member to another through the bowels of the ship that is a symphony of movement and tension. The actual rescue is satisfying as the twin stories of the rescuers and the rescued make for thrilling mirrors of each other.

Yet those stories are interrupted to go back to town, where Webber’s headstrong fiancee, Miriam (Holliday Grainger, “The Borgias”), waits anxiously for him to return. This is where “The Finest Hours” bogs down as the romantic element is the film’s weakest. The one upside here is Rachel Brosnahan (from the “Manhattan” TV series) as a woman whose sailor husband died in a similar storm years prior.

Back at sea, Foster, one of the best actors around today, is totally underutilized and doesn’t have much to do. The focus remains on Pine, who comes across as rather stiff, especially in his scenes with Grainger before he heads out on the mission. While there may be similarities in these segments to the ’50s charm of Brooklyn, there is little of the romantic electricity of that film.

Along with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (“Goosebumps,” “Blue Jasmine”), Gillespie plunges the viewer into the heart of the storm while many of the scenes in town glow appealingly as if shot through a scrim of nostalgia and memory. Still, some of the ocean effects and CGI are not as convincing as others, and the 3-D doesn’t add anything. The same goes for the Boston accents, which are notoriously difficult for actors to handle without lapsing into parody.

Ultimately, “The Finest Hours” doesn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean, but it can’t avoid its own choppy cinematic waters either.