The Silent Hour
review by Bobby Blakey
I have been a fan of Joel Kinnaman since seeing him on the TV series The Killing. Since he has been racking up some credits in the action department taking on Robocop, The Suicide Squad and more recently the John Woo action film Silent Night. Now he is back at it once again with The Silent Hour co-starring Sandra Mae Frank, Mekhi Phifer and Mark Strong from director Brad Anderson. Could this be yet another great action flick for Kinnaman or will it not be worth listening to?
The Silent Hour follows Boston Detective Frank Shaw who returns to duty after a career-altering injury leaves him with permanent hearing loss. Tasked with interpreting for Ava Fremont, a deaf witness to a brutal gang murder, they find themselves cornered in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building when the killers return to eliminate her. Cut off from the outside world, these two strangers must lean on each other to outsmart killers they can’t hear coming for their only hope of making it out alive.
With Silent Night he couldn’t speak and now he can’t here. I am starting to see a pattern to his characters now. All kidding aside, as someone who is dealing with hearing loss I found the concept to be pretty interesting, but sadly the film falls more into the generic pile as opposed to something stand out that it could have been. The story is simple and has the cast and idea to make it work, but never finds that special something to help it stand out.
The story reminded me of the 1992 action flick Trespass in its set-up and locale. The game of cat and mouse like this gives up a lot of options for some good action and fighting back, but it never gets out of the realm of generic and moderately slow. The biggest blunder here is how he deals with his hearing issue. It is constantly the focus of his problems and complaining as opposed to just being
the issue that makes things harder and the reasoning, he is in it at all. This is a missed opportunity and ends up making Kinnaman less of an action hero and more of a victim of his own issue.
Despite this, Kinnaman and Frank do what they can with this story and give decent performances that help it work more than it doesn’t. I didn’t hate this film at all, but when it was all done I just kind of felt like I had seen it before and wasn’t given any kind of its own voice.
Decide for yourself and check out The Silent Hour when it hits theaters on October 11th from Paramount.