Drilling for gas is bad, mmmkay?

Promised Land (2012)

Steve (Matt Damon) is a star salesman for a big natural gas company. He and his colleague Sue (Frances McDormand) are trying to get drilling rights from the people of a small rural town. Everything seems to be going according to the game plan until an elderly school teacher (Hal Holbrook) warns the town people about the dangers of gas drilling. If this wasn't trouble enough, Dustin (John Krasinski) an environmental activist comes along and starts to win the trust of the people. The story follows quite familiar paths, except for one twist near the end which almost saves the whole movie, but too bad it then gets back on the old track again. I don't know why but all the time I had the feeling I've seen this movie many times before and I even guessed the outcome during the first 30 minutes or so. Sure the twist was nice and surprised me but then again it was totally wasted in the end. Matt Damon and Frances McDormand pull out nice performances and I can't find a bad thing to say about the rest of them either, well except maybe from John Krasinski whose role was too much like his Jim Halpert from TheOffice. The direction was quite straight forward and I guess that was the main problem. This movie would have needed some spicing as the story, albeit interesting and having some nice dialogue, was just a bit too familiar to be told this way. And about the dialogue, there are some very good scenes in there, but also these unbelievably corny ones as well, especially towards the end. I don't want to sound like a polluting capitalist asshole, which I probably am, but anyway all this tree hugging mentality this movie pushed forward started to annoy me in the end. Which most certainly wasn't their intention I'm sure, as it tries to be subtle about it most of the time before the end third. Even though this movie left a bad taste in the end, it's not entirely bad, it starts off quite nicely and has it's moments, especially that twist near the end gets you thinking, but when all is said and done it's definitely not a good movie either.

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