Mark Reviews Movies: CRISIS (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 25, 2021

Each of the three stories in Crisis, writer/director Nicholas Jarecki's drama about different aspects of the opioid crisis, might have been able to stand on its own, revealing something vital about the epidemic of easily accessible, highly addictive pain-killers. Shoved together by way of plot and theme into an easily digestible two hours, though, the combination of these tales never quite gels. As for telling us something important, Jarecki's narrative barely scratches the surface of the problem.

There are three very different stories within this movie. Two of them, involving an undercover DEA operation and a grieving mother, are gradually merged. The other, revolving around a university science professor whose conscience is finally awakened after years of rubber-stamping pharmaceutical research, lingers in the periphery of what becomes the central plot.

It would have been too much, of course, to find a way to get the professor involved in the other, eventually unified stories, but that story's isolation gives us an idea of the transparency and downfall of Jarecki's method. If the one story can and does exist on its own, why can't the other two? What are we missing from the parts of each story, simply so the filmmaker can give us an interlocking sum?

Since it has nothing plot-wise to do with the other tales, we'll begin with the professor. He's Dr. Tyrone Brower (Gary Oldman), a dedicated (We know because he has a pregnant wife, played by Indira Varma, at home, who shows up in barely a handful of scenes) and respected (We can tell because his class laughs at his lousy jokes and everyone sympathizes with his eventual plight) educator and researcher. Tyrone's university lab has a contract with a major pharmaceutical company, which claims to have developed an effective and non-addictive pain-killer.

The lab's test results, which see a couple dozen mice dying of starvation from waiting for another dose of the drug, contradict that claim. The company's bigwigs (played by Luke Evans and Veronica Ferres) want Tyrone to change his report, even offering him a large grant as a kind of implied but unofficial bribe. The doctor, though, believes the release of the drug could become a major public health issue.

That story becomes a form of morality tale, as Tyrone's career and reputation are threatened by the company and a financially conscious dean (played by Greg Kinnear). It mostly becomes a series of threats and arguments, with the occasional proclamation from Tyrone about the importance of the truth, even as the company and, later, the government try to silence the doctor's findings.

It can't go any deeper, because Jarecki has two other stories to tell. One is about a DEA agent named Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer), who is undercover and tracking the movement of prescription opioids from Canada into the United States. This section progresses exactly as one would expect—with plenty of close calls and paranoia and debates about agency policy—while Jake also confronts the difficulty of having a family member addicted to heroin.

The third tale possesses the most obvious potential in terms of humanizing the opioid crisis, as Claire (Evangeline Lilly), a single mother in the Midwest, is recovering from her own addiction to prescription pain-killers. She's devastated when the police arrive to tell her that her teenage son has died of an apparent opioid overdose.

At this moment, Jarecki has to make his most obvious narrative choice—one that will determine if his movie is more about the harsh realities of this crisis or the potential to use the subject matter for less noble ends. The grief-stricken Claire, certain that her son's death was no accident, tracks down the son's connections to the drug trade and hires a private investigator to find the people at the top. That, obviously, puts her right in the middle of Jake's undercover operation.

The main point is that everything here could have been more—more focused, more intimate, more convincing. Jarecki clearly wants to address the human toll of the opioid epidemic—from Jake's addicted and spiraling sister (played by Lily-Rose Depp), to Claire's grief and the difficulties of her own recovery, even to Tyrone's primary concern that countless people might die if the new drug is put on the market. The filmmaker's intentions are sound, but his methods—twisting these stories into matters of university politics, corporate malfeasance, police procedure, and revenge—keep the foundational human concerns of these stories at a distance.

As a result, whatever point the filmmaker is trying to make with Crisis suffers, too. One plot here, combining Jake and Claire's stories, becomes familiar and routine, while skirting around the legal complexities (and systematic failings) of the drug war and the emotional devastation of opioid epidemic. The other—at least theoretically more intriguing as an examination of the legal and "legal" ways that these drugs arrive on the market—feels so separate from everything else that we wonder if Jarecki crammed it into this narrative solely for the movie's final and obvious statement.

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