MOVIE REVIEW: ‘McCanick’

Film: McCanick
Directed by: Josh C. Waller
Starring: David Morse, Cory Monteith, Mike Vogel

McCanick may ultimately end up being remembered solely for the fact it features Cory Monteith‘s final performance. When the Canadian actor passed away in July last year at the age of 31, he was primarily known for his role on Glee, but there’s enough promise discernible here to suggest he could have been bound for bigger things. It’s a shame then, really, that McCanick really isn’t his film. Indeed, it’s barely anyone’s film. The narrative ostensibly follows a day in the life of the titular Eugene “Mack” McCanick (David Morse), a veteran cop with a dark past and serious anger management issues, but in reality it barely serves any of the nebulous faces dispersed throughout its 90-minute running time. It’s often violent and can even veer towards harrowing, but without an engaging central character it swiftly runs out of steam.

Mack (Morse) is a homicide detective who’s just learned that a youth he put away some years earlier has been released. The con in question, Simon Weeks (Monteith), has some crucial information concerning the cop’s past and Mack is anxious to ensure he doesn’t talk. This leads him to undertake an increasingly ugly and aggressive search for Weeks, while flashbacks gradually reveal why the latter is so important to him.

The lack of a truly sympathetic lead character doesn’t have to be a film’s undoing. Audiences like antiheroes; they’ll still root for the likes of Travis Bickle and more recently Walter White no matter how horrendous their deeds. However, in order to elicit that kind of support, the character’s behaviour has to be set in some wider context. As one tutor of mine put it, you have the make the world around them dark enough that their behaviour seems, if not exactly commendable, at least understandable. This is the crucial mistake McCanick‘s writers make. The film presents a lead character so needlessly aggressive and single-mindedly cruel that he’s downright repugnant, his violence and unprofessionalism eliminating what little interest or appeal may have been gleaned from his surroundings. It’s hard to root for a man so intent on destroying someone’s life that he disregards the responsibilities of his job and recklessly endangers those around him. It would be one thing if he lived in a morally bankrupt world plagued by corruption but the city and people around Mack seem distinctly ordinary – human, decent types all forced to pay the price for his thuggish behaviour. Had the script actually found time for anyone other than him, the darkness of what transpires could have been grounded in something relatable. As it is, characters are picked up and dropped with impunity, serving no purpose in the overall storyline and doing precious little to flesh out Mack or contextualise his actions. The one third act reveal (signposted from quite early on) that does lend a vaguely human dimension to his behaviour comes from Weeks, and even that seems more of a justification for his obsession with the boy than a means of fleshing out his character.

These failings aren’t just shameful, they’re downright wasteful. Morse’s performance is a tour de force, and had there been more skilful writing to work off this could have been one of his best. Monteith too is extremely impressive. There’s frailty and compassion to his performance, rendered all the more poignant for the fact Weeks openly struggles with substance addiction. In the background, Mike Vogel registers well as Mack’s youthful partner, while Ciarán Hinds’ police captain makes hints at subplots that sound great in theory but never really come to fruition. Mack, like every troubled cop ever, has a strained relationship with his son but despite multiple allusions to the latter he never appears – in this, the film’s one-day structuring may be working against it, but considering the lead’s bullish behaviour throughout it’s actually perfectly understandable that his son would want nothing to do with him.

What emerges from all this is a warbled, confused, and confusing film that needlessly muddies the waters when it could be focusing on building and developing its characters. It loses appeal early on for want of any compelling personalities onscreen and often feels downright dismissive of the issues faced by its characters. With better handling, this could have shed some light on the psychology of desperation and cruelty, but, sadly for Monteith, it’ll hold little time in anyone’s memory.

SCORE: D

Review written by Grace Duffy

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