‘Sully’ is a dependable film, but not too exciting

How are you going to make a movie about the heroic exploits of the pilot, Sully, who pulled off the “Miracle on the Hudson?”

After all, everybody already knows that Chesley Sullenberger, aka “Sully,” saved an entire planeload of people by landing his crippled airliner on the Hudson River in 2009. Where’s the suspense?

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And we already know Sully’s a humble hero. Where’s the insight? Where’s the surprise? In other words, where’s the movie?

As actor Tom Hanks puts it as his dramatic voice narrates the film’s trailer:

No one warned us. No one said you are going to lose both engines at a lower altitude than any jet in history. This was duel engine loss at 2,800 feet followed by an immediate water landing with 155 souls on board. No one has ever trained for an incident like that.

Director Clint Eastwood does what he can to juice the storyline. But in the end, we’re pretty much where we were when we started: a veteran pilot uses his professional instincts to save a seemingly doomed flight. That makes for a solid, if unspectacular, movie plot.

Contributing to the film’s air of predictability is the casting of Tom Hanks. Who else are you going to get to play an up-standing, middle-aged gentleman facing a crisis? He does it well, but it’s awfully familiar.

For suspense’s sake, the movie tries to make us believe that Sully might have made a serious mistake landing on the river. Inspectors from the National Transportation and Safety Board initially maintain that he only lost one engine, not the two Sully claimed. And computer simulations suggest he could have made it back to the airport safely.

Sully is at first adamant he did the right thing, but with mounting NTSB evidence to the contrary, he actually does start questioning his own wisdom. This angle might have made for a fascinating film, a man who relies on his instincts in a moment of crisis runs headlong into statistical analysis that rejects those instincts. Was his humanity his weakness, not his strength? Was he heroic for saving all those lives only because he screwed up to begin with?

These are intriguing lines of thought that are definitely in the movie, but ultimately they come to naught. And in retrospect, they seem only to have served to artificially pump up the drama.

Ultimately, “Sully” is a lot like Chesley Sullenberger himself. Forthright, dependable, and not all that exciting.

I happen to prefer those qualities in a pilot than a film, but in both cases, they involve safe landings.