It is a startling coincidence that Hours enters our cinemas mere days after the death of its star, Paul Walker. The movie will stand as one of his final performances, which is kind of unfortunate. The film is not a very good showcase for the actor’s talents. It’s an awkwardly scripted and directed melodrama that puts too much weight on the shoulders of its lead actor. While Walker certainly deserves all the sympathy he’s gotten over the past few days, the movie doesn’t really deserve the same consideration.
The film starts with Nolan (Paul Walker) and his pregnant wife Abigail (Genesis Rodriguez) at the hospital. Abigail has gone into labor, five weeks premature. Outside, Hurricane Katrina is raging over New Orleans. Soon, Nolan is informed that his wife has died, but the baby is okay. His new daughter is in a respirator, unable to breathe on her own just yet. This becomes a real concern when the power goes out and the hospital is evacuated. It turns out that the respirator’s battery is faulty, and will only keep a couple of minutes of charge at a time. Nolan stays alone in the hospital, trying to keep to respirator running and his daughter alive.
It’s actually a really intriguing concept. The film posits this really complex survival situation that limits the protagonist to a really small area. Nolan has to use a hand-cranked generator to recharge the respirator’s battery every minute, and so he can’t venture out very far to find help and rescue. But the film’s execution is pretty lacking. First of all, it can’t really abide by its own rules, with scenes largely disregarding the actual length of the time limit. The film’s tension is built on this time limit, and its inability to depict that limit realistically hurts everything in the long run.
Secondly, the film doesn’t trust the immediacy of its own scenario, and ends up burying a lot of it under a lot of needless exposition. This really should have been a very quiet movie, focusing on the increasing desperation of the main character. But the film seems uncomfortable with its silence, so it has Nolan talking to himself, to the baby, and at points, the respirator. The filmmakers couldn’t seem to figure out how to convey the drama without words, and end up writing a slew of ridiculous lines. “You’re playing dirty, Mr. Machine,” he says at one point. It’s a terrible line, and it takes away from the solemnity of the situation.
This monologue-heavy approach proves to be a real hurdle for Paul Walker. Walker has always worked best in an ensemble, bouncing off other people. With no one to talk to, and with lines like the one mentioned above, Walker doesn’t come off very well. The film fails to play to the actor’s strengths. It has him narrating his exploits as he stumbles around in the dark, when his physicality would have been enough to convey those same ideas.
Hours misses the mark. The film has all of these solemn, serious ingredients: a real-life tragedy, a grieving husband, an unready father, and a growing sense of desperation. But the filmmaking fails those elements at every turn. It makes things laughable at some points, the main character made to say really dumb things in lieu of just existing within this milieu. The film really fails to capitalize on its ideas, and sadly ends up creating something really awkward and draining.
My Rating:
