Summary
If you ever wanted to learn about the intricacies of commercial fishing, Finestkin’s first half serves as the ideal Discovery Channel-type documentary to fall asleep to.
As the year draws to a close, movies that had their initial premiere at the Toronto Film Festival are continuing to trickle down to the masses via streaming services. Finestkind, written and directed by Academy-award winner Brian Helgeland, skipped a theatrical release in favor of landing on Paramount+.
While the movie is billed as a crime thriller, a more appropriate genre would be family melodrama. Finestkind centers on two estranged brothers, their relationships with their dads, and the New England commercial fishing industry, and towards the end, you meet some villainous villains from Boston.
Finestkind review and plot summary
At its core, this is a story about two stepbrothers. Fresh out of college, Charlie (Toby Wallace) seeks out his older brother, Tom (Ben Foster), and asks for a summer job with him as a fisherman. The two haven’t seen each other in quite some time, mostly because Tom doesn’t get along with his mom’s husband, Charlie’s father.
Tom eventually agrees to take his little stepbrother on his ship, and the young man immediately fits in with the other crew members – Costa (Ismael Cruz Córdova), Skeemo (Aaron Stanford), and Nunes.
Their vessel (poorly maintained by the company) sinks during Charlie’s first sea excursion, but everyone survives. After getting suitably drunk to celebrate being “not dead yet,” Charlie starts a romantic relationship with Jenna Ortega’s character, Mabel, who moonlights as a drug dealer for her mother.
RELATED: Where was Finestkind filmed?
Luckily, Tom’s estranged father, Ray (Tommy Lee Jones), offers him a job on his boat, which is aptly named Finestkind. The decision to illegally step into Canadian waters for scallops leads to the group being apprehended and heavily fined by the Coast Guard. If Tom wants to retrieve the boat from the impound, he must find a way to pay $100,0000.
Official synopses for this movie mention “two estranged brothers,” forced to make a deal with a “Boston Crime syndicate.” It takes one hour and 17 minutes before these mysterious gangsters come into play. That means the movie expects its audience to sit through 77 minutes of exposition and family/commercial fishing melodrama before the advertised plot even begins.
Considering the high caliber of Finestkind’s cast, their performances are average, at best. Jenna Ortega’s character is little more than glorified eye candy, while Tommy Lee Jones looks tired and delivers his lines with the enthusiasm of a bored office worker on a Monday morning.
Is Finestkind a fine movie?
This is a movie I wanted to love. It features an excellent ensemble cast and an intriguing premise. Yet something went wrong along the way. There’s too much unnecessary filler thrown in before anything happens.
Did we need an extended scene where Ortega’s character drives like a maniac to get Charlie on the fishing boat? Or a two-minute scene of Charlie excitedly explaining the ins and outs of commercial fishing to his concerned parents? We most certainly didn’t need a five-minute scene of the boy’s mother flirting with her dying ex in a bar. The first two-thirds of the movie is a discombobulated mess, and introducing the crime syndicate in the latter half doesn’t do much to animate this fishy snoozefest.
Certain lines like “Finestkind,” “Not dead yet,” and “You live and you die. It’s the in-between part that’s important” are repeated enough times to make any potential Finestkind-inspired drinking games dangerous. Ultimately, this is a boring, overly-long film that is unsure of the story it’s trying to tell.
What did you think of Finestkind? Comment below.
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