Sully

[3.5 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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Clint Eastwood directed, Tom Hanks is Sully, and it's about as good as it could be.

As we all know, back in January 2009, a US Airways flight out of LaGuardia hit a flock of geese as it was ascending, and both engines were lost. Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger kept his head, judged his options and chances, and set the jet down in the Hudson River, just off Manhattan. Thanks to him, the rest of the flight crew, and some quick-thinking rescuers, the fatality count was zero, when it could have been 155. Or more, if the Airbus had crashed somewhere in NYC.

But the entire flight took about five minutes, the rescue took about twenty minutes, how do you make a decent sized movie out of that?

Well, they fudged a bit, turning the subsequent NTSB investigation into more of an Inquisition than it actually was. Playing the primary (and entirely fictitious) heavy is the immortal UNH grad, Mike O'Malley, and he seems (at least for most of the movie) to want to argue that Sully could have made a safer return to LaGuardia, or made it to Teterboro NJ. Spoiler: given the time involved in diagnosis and alternative-weighing, probably not. Sully is vindicated, as also we already know.

Still: Tom Hanks does his usual fine job of getting into his character's skin. Everybody else is good too. It's always nice to see Valerie Mahaffey, who plays one of the passengers. And the special effects are pretty good, too: you'll swear that they just re-enacted the whole thing for the movie.


Last Modified 2024-01-26 6:49 AM EDT