Out of the Furnace: Ruthless Revenge in the Rust Belt

In writer-director Scott Cooper’s grim new feature, Out of the Furnace, Christian Bale portrays Russell Baze, a steelworker in the sputtering town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Baze is a stand-up guy who cares for his terminally ill father, dotes on his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Seldana), and keeps an eye on his younger brother Rodney, Jr. (Casey Affleck), an Army veteran with a gambling habit. The latter task includes paying his sibling’s debts to local bookmaker John Petty (Willem Dafoe). However, Russell’s good intentions don’t stop him from drunkenly climbing behind the wheel one fateful night, and killing two people as a result.

While Russell serves time for this fatal mistake, the world rolls on: his father passes away, Lena finds solace with the local police chief (Forest Whitaker), and Rodney returns from a fourth Iraq tour an utterly broken man.  As Russell tries to rebuild his life, Rodney becomes entangled in underground blood sports to pay his ever-mounting debts, leading him into the lethal orbit of unhinged meth kingpin Harlan DeGroat (Wood Harrelson). Needless to say, this ends badly for Rodney. When the police’s subsequent investigation of the matter stalls, Russell’s wrath naturally drives him to pursue vigilante justice against the vile DeGroat.

Out of the Furnace shares with Cooper’s prior feature Crazy Heart an unfortunate predictability, here coupled with a propensity for indulgent wheel-spinning. (The new film’s running time could easily have been cut by thirty minutes.) That said, Cooper capably conveys the entropic Rust Belt anguish of the film’s setting, thanks in part to location shooting in real-world Braddock, and in part to an absurdly overqualified cast. As revenge thrillers go, Out of the Furnace is mostly unremarkable, but its potent atmosphere and absorbing performances allow it to rise above an otherwise facile narrative.