This watchable drama from director Craig Gillespie (Lars And The Real Girl) is based on a true story, although you can’t help but wonder how much of it has been fictionalised, and how much you’re being emotionally manipulated. Even as you’re being emotionally manipulated.

We first meet young coast guard member Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) in a small Massachusetts town in 1951 as he struggles through a date with looker Miriam (Holliday Grainger), and Pine tries to convince us that he’s uneasy around girls (despite having played the randy young Captain Kirk in the new Star Treks). A year or so later and, in February 1952, shortly after Bernie and Miriam decide to marry, a huge storm hits the coast, and a pair of oil tankers are both split in half off the coast of Cape Cod (and is there some kind of cause-and-effect thing going on here?)

Bernie, who’s haunted by a previous trauma in his dangerous job, is ordered to help and sent on what could well be a suicide mission by commanding officer Daniel Cluff (Eric Bana). Luckily Bernie has assistance from three plucky lads, Andy Fitzgerald (Kyle Gallner), Ervin Maske (John Magaro) and Richard Livesay (Ben Foster), and their plight is inter-cut with waterlogged activities on the still-afloat back-end of one of the tankers, where unpopular engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) battles the elements and his clichéd colleagues.

With better maritime disaster special effects than The Perfect Storm and amiable playing from Pine, Affleck and Grainger (who looks very ‘50s but often behaves like a radical feminist), this is agreeably exciting and tense at times, despite the fact that it’s obvious that very little of it is, you know, real.

The Finest Hours is in cinemas now

Rating

3/5

Rated

PG