The film hits all the expected crowd-pleasing beats as this ragtag municipal outfit trains and applies for elite status, learning to work together as a team through an episodic series of hair-raising incidents before the inevitable tragedy you probably heard about on the news a few years ago. Taylor Kitsch and James Badge Dale are on hand to provide roughhousing comic relief while Jeff Bridges eases into a porch rocker as his now-trademarked old coot dispensing wisdom. Miles Teller co-stars as an unemployable junkie screwup who gets his girlfriend pregnant and sees this crew as his last shot at redemption. Not that it doesn’t have fun with the obvious archetypes – Josh Brolin was basically born to play the kind of gruff, no-nonsense commanding officer who stands on ridges talking to the wildfires as he tries to predict where they’re headed next. At every step the movie’s a little deeper and more thoughtful than anticipated. (Hell, the synopsis alone sounds like a terrible Peter Berg movie waiting to happen.) But there’s a prickly specificity to these characters, played by a terrific cast as three-dimensional adults with messy pasts and lives that continue beyond just what we see onscreen. The film, which follows a squad of elite firefighters dispatched to the front lines of forest blazes throughout the Southwest, could have quite easily curdled into Americana corn. There’s a Howard Hawks-ian brio to director Joseph Kosinski’s Only The Brave, a relaxed, no-muss-no-fuss camaraderie of stoic men doing their jobs that in its best moments reminded me of Red River or Only Angels Have Wings. Screenplay by Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer. Starring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Taylor Kitsch and Jeff Bridges.
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