Finestkind

This might be the softest, tough guy crime movie I’ve encountered in a while. 

What it’s meant to be is a pressure cooker flick where salty fishermen keep diving into trouble, first with the law and then with real criminals until the story reaches its murderous conclusion. 

But what actually happens is a bunch of knuckleheads keep doing knucklehead things until they get bailed out at the end. 

Then it ends on a supposedly happy note (with maybe one of the most cringey things I’ve seen in a while) and the guys go back to fishing. 

And of course given what the movie shows me about these guys you just know they are all gonna be fried like the scallops not long after the credits roll. 

I will say that the movie kept me engaged and I really enjoyed Tommy Lee Jones slipping comfortably into another one of his salt of the earth/sorry I was a terrible father roles. 

Ben Foster is also respectable as a grizzled captain of men / older brother. And I thought Clayne Crawford was a firecracker as the heavy. 

But it’s soooo blunt and heavy handed. 

The movie takes great pains to explain what “finest kind” means in the vernacular of this fishing community. It’s kind of cool and they never should have explained it. Or if they were going to it should not have been explained in such a way that it was basically like a spotlight pointed at the audience going, “See, see this is it. Pay attention!”

Another is when the characters take one phrase of wisdom from Jones’ character and repeats it until you just want to sink. 

However, I liked a lot of this and can see why everyone thought it could work. It’s a movie they would have made in the 1990s that probably would have been a mid level hit at the theater. 

And when I say soft consider this: the characters need $100,000 to get a boat back from seizure. At the end of the movie one of the characters borrows it from his dad, who wants him to become a lawyer and stop fishing. 

The dad has a sudden change of heart and comes up with the money.

The movie also spends some of its resources pointing out that Jenna Ortega’s Mabel is from the wrong side of the tracks. 

In the end she is welcome into her new boyfriend’s family by his loving mom who grew up in those some bad neighborhoods. 

Sofffttt. The movie is soft. 

But, I gotta say I thought most of it worked really work well. It wasn’t until the obvious twists in the second half and the easy resolutions to the everyone’s problems that I really thought this thing lost its way. 

And then there is that ending. Woof.