Jeff Bridges plays a gruff-but-friendly fire chief, James Badge Dale plays the steady second in command, and Taylor Kitsch's grinning, goofy swagger lightens the affair. But the movie resonates in that timelessness, in no small part because of the sterling crew. The spectacular firestorms that lend Only the Brave its visual panache envelop a rather straightforward story: Outsider McDonough earns the respect and admiration of his peers through hard work and talent at his job. Only the Brave is a surprisingly funny film, given the seriousness of its subject matter, one that mines laughs from the good-natured, teasing back-and-forths that define many male friendships. Newly a father, newly a convict, and newly homeless, Brendan stumbles onto Marsh's unit looking for a job while trying to stay clean. If they don't get federal qualification they can't get on the front lines of forest fires-and if they can't get on the front lines, well, what's the point?Īs Marsh is trying to put his team together, Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller) is trying to pull his life together. When Only the Brave begins, his squad is limited to clean up duty: bureaucratic tangles and budgetary constraints have his team, the only such municipal squad in the country, relegated to trainee status, a line-item to be removed from next year's town budget. That blazing, doomed grizzly is a useful metaphor for the "hotshots" we're about to meet, firefighters who do battle with the infernos that periodically burn through America's arid west.Įric Marsh (Josh Brolin), the superintendent whose dream of the burning bear kicks off the film, leads the team of would-be hotshots. The films opens with the bear running at the camera before we cut to a man jolting awake we see the fiery ursine figure again later from above, running through the forest, before cutting to a line of firefighters moving through a burnt-out section of woods. There's a recurring image of a bear on fire running through a burning forest in Only the Brave-a visual at once starkly horrifying yet majestic, like something out of a high-fantasy production.
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