The Hero Review
Sam Elliott has made a name for himself through many years as the supporting actor who outshines his leading man or woman. Well, his time has come now for a leading role in The Hero. Now I’ll start by saying this: Sam Elliott is a very good actor who usually picks pretty good projects most of the time, and while I appreciated his work in this, I didn’t find the film all that compelling. It drug its feet for nearly all of the first half then when it got interesting, it lost interest in that material relatively fast then got boring again. It’s just not a very good film.
So we follow Lee Hayden, a former big-time western star who is burning out the rest of his days in Hollywood recording ads for BBQ companies and being ever further separated from his family, who really don’t want anything to do with him. However, after he is diagnosed with cancer, Lee struggles to tell everyone, instead saying he’s making a new movie. As he begins a romance with a friend of a friend, an awards ceremony speech brings him fame via the internet, which might lead to a return to stardom for Lee, but with everything else fighting against him, Lee realizes that perhaps wishing for the next big film is nothing special and instead those around him are the real movie he wants to make. Okay, I’m done bs-ing over the plot of the movie.
For the pros of the film, I can start and end with Sam Elliott. He does fine work as Lee, and Elliott’s been doing fine work in the past few years, but this is the last film I can think of where he’s been anything other than that, and he’s given a lot of good quiet scenes where his face and his expressions tell the story better than dialogue can. I commend him for that, and honestly, not too many actors out there could have pulled off a role like this. I also liked Nick Offerman as his best bud in the film. His role is a relatively small one, so if you see the film don’t expect him to be in every other scene. Also there’s a scene with Elliott where he is auditioning for a role that is very nice. I’ll just leave it at that.
Okay, so as I alluded to earlier, the film is lacking of any energy in the whole first act. Seriously, outside of the scenes where Lee meets with Offerman’s character and his being diagnosed with cancer, I don’t remember anything significant. Again, no energy is put into it. Then there’s the scene where he travels to get a lifetime achievement award and he gives an acceptance speech that catches fire online and gives him fame again for a fleeting moment, and it felt like, “Oh, here we go. Here’s where things pick up”, and the film almost feels like it goes into a western-star version of Birdman (2014), and the film already had a few of the same ideas going: an actor who’s been in and out of the lime light throughout their career playing another actor who’s trying to vindicate what they’re doing, but can’t escape the shadow of their most famous role, and their personal lives are a mess. Of course the thing that made Birdman such a standout with this story is the energy that director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu brought to that film. Brett Haley is the director for The Hero, and at no point does he come close to matching the intensity or creative juices that made Birdman soar. Okay, that was cheesy. Speaking of cheesy, how about the cliched love story? Laura Prepon plays the squeeze, and again there’s no energy to the scenes. I felt no passion or chemistry between the two characters, and it really felt weird considering the age gap, which is joked about in the film, but I never bought it. Nothing against the actors and their performances, but there’s just nothing for them to work with, and the same goes for Krysten Ritter as Lee’s daughter, and again here’s a character I can’t remember anything about other than Krysten Ritten plays her and she’s Lee daughter, and that’s about all they want you to know. Also I’m not at all a fan of dream sequences. Outside of a few examples, they never work for me, and there’s a lot of them in The Hero. They just distract from Lee’s current day story and pad the film’s already brief running time. Well, maybe’s that’s another positive: at least it’s not a film that’s two hours and twenty minutes, because then it would be unbearable.
So yeah, I can’t recommend the film. Even at a little over an hour and a half, the film has no engine pulling the train, no drive and a lot of elements that are very disinteresting. And when it does feel like it’s going to start getting good, the film ditches those ideas and goes back to the dull stuff to finish off the last twenty or so minutes. Again, I’ll say that Sam Elliott hasn’t been this good in a while and he’s a terrific actor who deserves great vehicles in the future, and at the very least maybe he can get that out of it. I’d love to see him take another crack at a lead role that would give him potential awards contention, but The Hero ain’t it.
My rating: 4/10.
