Force of Nature (2020)

Force of Nature arrives as a hurricane heist picture with a title that promises more meteorological fury than the budget could deliver. Michael Polish directs a gallery of familiar faces through a Puerto Rico apartment complex, where thieves hunt a painting worth two hundred million dollars and a disgraced cop named Ray, played by Mel Gibson, refuses to evacuate. The storm is a device. It floods basements and kills the radios. It carries no message about the climate, and nobody in the film pauses to deliver one. That is, in its way, a small mercy.

The casting reflects the setting with reasonable honesty. David Zayas, Stephanie Cayo, Will Catlett and Rey Hernandez appear as officers and residents, and their presence reads as geography, not as an announcement. The film makes no argument about race or identity, and it does not need to. Kate Bosworth's Troy is a doctor who stitches wounds, dives through flooded rooms and shoots a man. She is capable because the script requires a capable person in that hallway. No thesis attaches to her. The remaining markers sit at zero, and they sit there honestly. No LGBTQ characters. No body-positivity subplot. No neurodivergent arc. No critique of the wealthy, though the villains do covet a painting, which is greed in its oldest and least ideological form.

The result is a B-movie with a tiger, an 8% approval rating, and the quiet dignity of a film that wants nothing from us but ninety minutes. It is not preachy. It is not enlightened. It is a heist picture in the rain, and it knows exactly how little it is. There is something almost restful about that, after a decade of movies straining to mean more than they can carry. This one carries a wet bucket of meat and a tiger, and nothing else at all.

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