Every story has to have a purpose…

It would have been pretty easy to dismiss this adaptation of true story Not Without Hope as a generally blunt faith based affair, but thanks to some solid direction and some (mostly) understated performances it actually turns into a piece of human drama that people can relate to.

This an extraordinary true story, based on the New York Times best-seller.  Best friends Nick Schuyler (Zachary Levi) and Will Bleakley (Marshall Cook), and NFL players Marquis Cooper (Quentin Plair) and Corey Smith (Terrence Terrell), depart Clearwater, Florida for a fishing trip 70 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. While attempting to free a trapped anchor before a fierce storm hits, their boat capsizes, throwing the four friends violently into the freezing water. US Coast Guard Captain Timothy Close (Josh Duhamel) and his crew, beaten back in their air rescue efforts, summon their largest ship to cut through the raging ocean as the group battles massive waves, dehydration, severe hypothermia, and even sharks, in their epic struggle to survive and return home to their distraught loved ones.

With director Joe Carnahan at the helm I was at least somewhat hopeful that this could turn out half decent, and it actually did because while it could have devolved into a story about the power of faith and belief in a higher power in the face of a crisis, this was actually more of a mediation into the prospect of facing one’s mortality, which while a drift on the open sea is an idea that is pretty easy to get behind.

While working on an obvious budget of having his actors in a wave pool, Carnahan isn’t afraid to make sure that the elements of the situation come into play.  Sure it drags its feet at times but it’s a film about the endurance of the human spirit and Carnahan manages to (mostly) avoid any hammy tropes and allows his actors to express the desperation of the moment.  It could have been very over the top with lines between characters making sure that they tell the other ones mother that they love her (that does sneak in a little bit) or about a believing in a God that put them in this situation while adrift at sea (that does sneak in a little as well) but the attempts at displaying human frailty come through.

The four men on the boat are strong, lead by Levi as their situation keeps getting worse and while the occasional dramatic flourish from the actors in a script with the occasional hokey line read is unavoidable, it doesn’t overly reduce the humanity of the moment.  This is a story of four friends who are essentially staring their own mortality and death in the face, it’s not a situation that many people actually get to walk away from and appreciate.  No one in this is lighting the world on fire from a dramatic performance standpoint but they all do enough to suspend our disbelief that they are in a wave pool next to a wind machine…and sometimes that’s enough.  Only Josh Duhamel as our square chinned Coast Guard captain was a clichéd disappointment reading pull quotes from a motivational hand book as dialogue.  It’s not his fault, he just had nothing to work with.

Ultimately, Not Without Hope is a passable human drama that probably read better as a book then it does on the screen.