THE 33 See listing. Rating: NN
A clumsy dramatization of the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, Patricia Riggen’s The 33 can at least be credited with mining an under-explored sub-genre: the chamber disaster movie.
The bizarrely selected international cast includes Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, Lou Diamond Phillips and Gabriel Byrne, their broadly sketched characters speaking English with accents that sound as Chicano as Chileno.
Fending off claustrophobia by alternating between the miners trapped 23,000 feet under the Atacama Desert and the politicians, technicians and families desperate to rescue them, the film is a curious spin on the upstairs-downstairs drama, though it shows scant interest in anything as complicated as class dynamics.
More concerned with psychology than survival, the second half is more interesting and absolutely emotionally engaging – which isn’t the same as good. The dialogue is appalling and the obstacles rote. The 33 attests to how often the most amazing true stories become inert when rendered as drama. 127 minutes.
