TIFF 2023: Finestkind Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Finestkind is the newest crime thriller from academy award winning filmmaker Brian Helgeland. It follows estranged brothers Tom (Foster) and Charlie (Wallace) who reunite after years apart when Tom brings Charlie onto his fishing crew. After a fishing trip goes wrong, the two brothers are forced to hatch a deal with Pete Weeks, the ruthless leader of a Boston crime syndicate (Clayne Crwaford), spelling danger for the brothers and their father Ray (Jones) and as a mysterious young woman named Mabel (Jenna Ortega). Deeply flawed, the film never reaches the heights of the talent in front of and behind the camera would suggest. In spite of that, it still delivers a fairly watchable mix of a crime thriller and a family drama where the highs more than outweigh the lows.

Finestkind starts off pretty rough but it also takes way too long to get to its central plot, meandering quite a bit until it does. There’s absolutely no reason why it was as long as it was, clocking in at just over 2-hours, considering the amount of actual story here. Meanwhile, it’s surprising that the film was written by an Academy Award winning screenwriter because seeing that some of the dialogue is absolutely awful and laughable as the film struggles at times to balance its two vastly different tones.

However, once the film truly gets going, it becomes a pretty intense and entertaining thriller that does a good job building tension and intrigue with each passing scene. The brotherly bond between Tom and Charlie is pretty strong throughout but it’s the complex father son relationship between Tom and Ray that’s the most effective, delivering most of the film’s hard-hitting and emotional moments. The cast as a whole are great and despite much of the questionable dialog, walk away completely unscathed. While Wallace and Ortega have cute chemistry together, Foster and Jones are the easy standouts. Jones, in particular, delivers one of his best performances in years. Crawford is a lot of fun here too as Weeks, hamming it up without overdoing it.

Not nearly as bad as some of the initial reviews would lead audiences to believe, Finestkind is a decent enough watch for fans of crime thrillers or the recent Taylor Sheridan Paramount+ series which makes sense as it is an original film on the same streaming platform. Ultimately, it is perfectly suited for streaming and will likely draw a lot of viewers once it premieres sometime in November.

*still courtesy of Paramount+*

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Connor Carey

www.connorsmoviereviews.com/