"A gritty, dark mood permeates throughout and is held up by a fantastic cast"

A great director and a great script can make any actor look good. Some actors are obviously better than others but when the material you're working with is gold it's difficult to turn out a stinker. A great actor really proves their worth when they are able to elevate a sub-par movie and make it watchable. This is particularly evident in writer-director Scott Cooper's hard-boiled melodrama Out of the Furnace. Crazy Heart, Cooper's last film, took home the Oscar for best actor and he continues to build a reputation of squeezing fine performances out of his actors here. Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson lead a strong cast and together, just about manage to hold up the paper-thin script.

Bale plays Russell Baze, a steel-worker living in Appalachian Pennsylvania. He's hard-working, committed and seems to have his head screwed on, which is more than can be said for his brother Rodney (Affleck), an Iraq war veteran who is struggling to pay off his gambling debts and has turned to the world of illegal bare-knuckle boxing. Russell spends most of his time trying to keep Rodney out of trouble and caring for his dying father. Monstrous drug-dealer and fight promoter Harlan DeGroat (Harrelson) enters the fray and it would be an insult to your intelligence if you can't see where the story is heading by this point.

The plot is a mass of melodramatic clichés that occasionally looks like it's trying to do something interesting but disappointingly never strays far enough from the path to truly engage its audience. Baze's father is on his death bed, his ex-girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) is pregnant and her new partner (Forest Whitaker) is snooping around in Russell's business. Practically every aspect of this film's story feels like it's been lifted from the very first lesson at screenwriting school, nothing that happens here feels new or interesting. It is a surprise then that Out of the Furnace is actually quite watchable, Cooper and his co-writer Brad Ingelsby have ramped up the suspense and told a depressing story that, while often overcooked, is tense and fairly enjoyable.

A gritty, dark mood permeates throughout and is held up by a fantastic cast. Harrelson is brilliant as the viciously chilling antagonist; Whitaker, Saldana, Affleck and Willem Dafoe are all solid in their smaller parts and Christian Bale is well...Christian Bale. The cast really is Out of the Furnace's saving grace as the film would have little to stand on otherwise.

It's a grim film which won't live on in many memories, it looks quite nice and is kept alive by a few tense scenes but this is conventional filmmaking at its very worst. Out of the Furnace is by no means bad, audiences won't hate this film, they'll just be disappointed. It offers very little in the way of anything new and most of the time doesn't even really feel like trying, by the time the denouement rolls around most will have given up. The strong cast and chilling atmosphere makes the film perfectly passable, but with so much quality around in the cinema at the moment, why would you settle for this?