The 33

The real life plight of 33 Chilean min­ers trapped down a mine shaft for 69 days is inel­e­gant­ly cor­ralled into a self-assem­bly dis­as­ter movie by direc­tor Patri­cia Riggen. Pos­si­bly pay­ing lip ser­vice to the pan glob­al efforts made to help free the men once their sit­u­a­tion become a media focal point, The 33 offers the chance for a num­ber of actors from coun­tries such as France (Juli­ette Binoche) and Ire­land (Gabriel Byrne) to break out their throaty Latin Amer­i­can twangs.

La Binoche emerges from pro­ceed­ings, if not smelling of ros­es, then some kind of chem­i­cal for­mu­la­tion made to approx­i­mate the bou­quet of ros­es or rose-like flow­ers. Byrne, on the oth­er hand, cant quite sup­press his nat­ur­al brogue, which makes it much tougher to take all this very seriously.

The men descend­ing into the mine on that fate­ful day of the dis­as­ter are intro­duced as hap­py-go-lucky types who all have roman­tic, fam­i­ly or eco­nom­ic issues they all want to tend to after this shift. Despite a pre­dictably apa­thet­ic fore­man who has nev­er heed­ed safe­ty warn­ings or basic employ­ment reg­u­la­tion, the men go about their treach­er­ous busi­ness, and it’s not long before the roof caves in and they are ensnared in a small atri­um with no life­line to the ground above.

Tak­ing on lead­er­ship detail is Anto­nio Ban­deras as ​“Super” Mario Sepúlve­da, who spends much of the film giv­ing hope-based pep talks and pre­vent­ing some of his more hot-head­ed col­leagues from mak­ing their prospects for sur­vival even slim­mer than they are. Cleav­ing loose­ly to real events means that the dra­mat­ic arc peaks around the mid-sec­tion of the film, where a deep drill man­ages to find its way through to their prison. Riggen plays the sequence for a cer­tain phal­lic grav­i­tas, with Ban­deras stand­ing top­less as this giant, drip­ping drill bit pro­trudes from the roof above them.

By that point, the dynam­ics of the res­cue mis­sion lose their inten­si­ty, espe­cial­ly when all man­ner of food and crea­ture com­forts are being sent down the hole so the min­ers’ wait is as pleas­ant as can be hoped. Though their even­tu­al escape is down to a mirac­u­lous feat of engi­neer­ing, you can’t help but feel it would’ve been a bet­ter, more thrilling film were audi­ence per­spec­tive to have been lim­it­ed to either the hell­ish deeps or the above-ground bureaucracy.