Chilean mining disaster brought to life in 'The 33'

Imagine being trapped 2,300 feet below ground for 69 days. "The 33," an account of the internationally infamous 2010 Chilean mining accident, will help viewers only a little to conjure up that dire predicament.

The docudrama nicely evokes the havoc of the initial cave-in, but spends too much time above ground to convey the existential horror of the almost-buried men.

Mexico-bred, Hollywood-based director Patricia Riggen divides the action equitably between three factions: the miners, their families and the rescuers. To do that, she and the screenwriters must reduce most of the dramatic personae to a single defining characteristic, if that. One of the trapped miner's only attribute is that he's Bolivian, which makes him a target of nationalist ridicule from his Chilean cohorts.

Far below the bone-dry Atacama desert, Mario (Antonio Banderas) is the natural leader of the 33 miners, assuming the duty of stretching three days of food so that it will last for almost three weeks, when provisions finally arrive from above. Luis (Lou Diamond Phillips) is actually the crew's foreman, but he is better at solving technical issues than human ones. The other miners barely emerge from the shadows, although alcoholic Dario (Juan Pablo Raba) makes an impression with a bad case of the DTs, and by having an outspoken sister who pleads his case up top.

She's Maria (Juliette Binoche), a vendor of empanadas who becomes the unofficial mayor of "Camp Hope," the tent city set up by the miners' families. This scrappy woman challenges the officials and politicians, most notably the inexperienced minister of mines (Rodrigo Santoro), goading the engineers (principally Gabriel Byrne's Andre Sougarret) to try harder. A laconic James Brolin is on hand as drilling expert Jeff Hart, representing the significant American role in the rescue.

Although fictionalized here and there, the movie is based on Hector Tobar's book "Deep Down Dark," which was written with the cooperation of the gold and copper miners. The roles of Mario and Maria are enlarged, and Banderas and Binoche further inflate their parts with overly theatrical performances.

Mismatched acting styles are to be expected in an international production like this. The bulk of the dialogue is in English, delivered in a range of accents. Some of the performers are fluent in Spanish, if not specifically the Chilean variety, while others cultivate a Latin inflection of some sort. Playing a Chilean, Byrne seems to be trying simply not to sound as Irish as he normally does.

If "The 33" is rarely as stirring as the story on which it's based, it's a significant improvement on Riggen's debut feature, "Under the Same Moon," a sentimental immigration fable. Most accomplished are the underground scenes, shot in mines in Colombia, and edgily evocative of gloom and claustrophobia.

The power of these sequences argues that the movie should have concentrated on the miners. Their rescue is the film's payoff, of course, but it's never in doubt. Rather than reconstructing what millions of television viewers already saw, "The 33" would be stronger if it emphasized the side of the story that few people, happily, will ever experience.