In a directing career that kick-started with Tom Hanks falling in love with a fish (Splash), Ron Howard’s interests have gravitated more recently towards true-life stories, both in his dramas (Frost/Nixon, Rush, Hillbilly Elegy) and in his newfound predilection for documentary (portraits of The Beatles and Pavarotti, plus Rebuilding Paradise and We Feed People, two films documenting very different disasters). This passion for veracity is present in Thirteen Lives, Howard’s low-key but ultimately engaging re-staging of the rescue of a Thai kids’ football team trapped in a network of caves filling up with water, the documentary feel of which works to both its detriment and success.
It’s a slow, subdued start. There is little in the way of preamble to get us involved with the kids and Howard sensitively eschews showing the minutiae of the team getting trapped. Instead, he is more interested in the response to the crisis in curiously uninvolving scenes depicting the worry of the families, the Royal Thai Navy SEALs’ failed attempt at a rescue, revered monk Kruba Boonchum’s (Nyi Nyi Lwin) arrival to give the people sustenance (Howard overdoes cutaways of tiny Buddhas and religious trinkets), and the machinations of who is politically taking the fall for the disaster. This battle amongst the authorities feels like a ripe area for gripping subterfuge but feels thrown away.
The way in which the team are extracted to safety is precisely etched and gripping.
Things don’t really improve when the movie stars show up. Colin Farrell (doing an off-putting English accent) as John Volanthen and Viggo Mortensen as Richard Stanton both give incredibly muted, presumably-designed-to-be-naturalistic performances as the British cave-divers with true expertise — the only distinctive character trait that either of them displays is a possessive quality over custard creams. (Hopefully Thirteen Lives will do for the biscuit what Avengers Assemble did for shawarma.)
Around the mission to save the kids is the equally important work of Thanet Natisri (Nophand Boonyai), a water engineer who takes matters into his own hands and sets about recruiting locals to divert millions of gallons of water away from the mountainside to stop the caves getting flooded further. It’s a noble endeavour, but not particularly the stuff of memorable drama.
But stick with it and things do improve. Caves, rain and torchlight are always cinematic — there are also some fancy-dan graphics to tell us what chamber the kids/rescuers are in — and Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom finds haunting, textured imagery in stalactite tunnels. Howard is a past master at making you care about an outcome you already know — see Apollo 13 and Rush — and when the film moves into the business end, coinciding with Joel Edgerton turning up as a maverick pal of Stanton and Volanthen, Thirteen Lives delivers.
Howard understands that the juice here is in the details, and the way in which the team are extracted to safety is precisely etched and gripping. You get the sense that this is the reason why Howard wanted to do the movie and, like his itinerant cave-divers, it’s here that all his experience and skills pay off.
