Promised Land

Written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski, Promised Land follows natural gas representative Steve Butler (Damon) as he arrives in a small midwestern town intending to buy huge chunks of land for his billion-dollar company – with the film detailing the conflict that arises after an environmentally-conscious crusader (Krasinski’s Dustin Noble) begins scaring the locals with fracking horror stories. It’s rather unfortunate to note that Promised Land eventually becomes as one-sided as its premise might’ve indicated, which is a shame, certainly, given the strength of the movie’s initial stretch – with Damon’s expectedly superb work heightened by a strong supporting cast that includes Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Hal Holbrook. The inclusion of several captivating early sequences – eg Steve’s coffee-shop encounter with an avaricious politician – perpetuates the film’s compulsively watchable atmosphere, although there does, perhaps inevitably, reach a point at which the narrative begins to demonstrably run out of steam (ie the second half of the film is just crushingly uneventful). It doesn’t help, either, that scripters Damon and Krasinski begin to emphasize elements of an almost eye-rollingly unsubtle nature, with the grossly simplistic trajectory of Steve’s character arc (ie his eyes are slowly-but-surely opened to the perils of fracking) standing as the most obvious (and problematic) example of this. And although Damon and Krasinski offer up a decent last-minute twist, Promised Land is, in the final analysis, thwarted by a heavy-handed, energy-draining execution that effectively cancels out its positive attributes and cements its place as a hopelessly biased polemic.

** out of ****

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