‘Slingshot’ sets its mind games in outer space
“Slingshot” — 2 stars
“Slingshot” belongs to a genre that could be called “man in a can” movies — films where the protagonist is isolated in an enclosed space for much, if not all, of the running time. Although the space can be a car (“Locke”) or a boat (“All Is Lost”) or a room (“Room”), it’s usually a spaceship. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the granddaddy and movies like “Gravity,” “Moon” and “Apollo 13” are its progeny. “Slingshot” isn’t of the same high quality, but if you’ve ever wanted to watch Casey Affleck lose his marbles over the course of an hour and 45 minutes, here’s your chance.
His character, an astronaut named John, is aboard an interplanetary probe headed to one of Saturn’s moons to extract its methane and fight climate change on Earth. (Don’t ask; it’s movie science.) Riding along is the highly strung Nash (Israeli actor Tomer Capone) and the mission’s leader, Captain Franks, played by a ramrod Laurence Fishburne. The flight is long enough that the astronauts have to go into chemically induced hibernation for three months at a time, periodically waking up to make sure they’re still on course. It’s in those waking moments that “Slingshot” takes place, and it’s in the somnolent gaps that it gathers tension.
Nash is the first to show signs of psychological wear and tear, and when the Odyssey 1 takes a hit to its hull from a piece of unidentified space junk, he starts agitating to turn the ship around and high-tail it home. The Captain is not amused, especially since the crew will soon need to execute a successful move called the “slingshot” that will allow them to use Jupiter’s gravitational field to boomerang past it to Saturn and Titan. (More movie science; there will not be a quiz.) John is caught between his shipmates in a war of wills that threatens to turn mutinous and possibly worse.
On top of that, John’s hearing voices, particularly that of Zoe (Emily Beecham), the spaceship designer he loved and left back on Earth. All of this is essentially a setup for the main order of business in “Slingshot,” which is a suspenseful three-way guessing game of Which One’s the Crazy One. Nash keeps coming up with byzantine conspiracy theories, Franks starts summoning his inner Captain Bligh, and John desperately tries to separate hallucination from reality. Is it the cocktail of hypersleep drugs that’s sending them around the bend? The lack of physical reference points? The food? Or is Nash right and is something more nefarious afoot?
The challenge facing Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström (“Evil,” “1408”) is to maintain this taut stalemate for 100-odd minutes while keeping an audience dramatically engaged. He fails that challenge on a number of counts, chief among them an arguably miscast Affleck in the lead. The actor doesn’t play vulnerability with ease — indeed, that guardedness is the key to his heartbreaking Oscar-winning performance in “Manchester by the Sea” — and John is too much the professional to let his confusion show to the others until late in the game. With a hero this passive, unfortunately, the movie can’t help but spin its wheels.
The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next. But because the protagonist is so remote, the endings feel like an empty exercise. Ironically, the flashbacks to John and Zoe’s romance on Earth have all the heat and energy and wit the main story line lacks. When the ingredients are freshest before the man even goes in the can, Houston, you have a problem.
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Rated R for language and some violence/bloody images. 109 minutes.