Please?ĭuane Steinbrink: Hey, now, that’s nice. Come on, Duane, you’re the Wildland fire chief. Fear and greed, right?ĭuane Steinbrink: Eric, that attitude that you got right there, that cost you a lot of friends in the department.Įric Marsh: I don’t care. Hotshots are on the frontline and they get to engage the fire directly.ĭuane Steinbrink: Now, there are two things that’ll make the mayor move. If you give me a chance I won’t let you down.Įric Marsh: Do you know the difference between a type two crew and Hotshots?īrendan McDonough: Yes, sir. I just had a daughter and I just really want to give her what I never had.īrendan McDonough: I just had a daughter and I just really want to give her what I never had. If you give me a chance I won’t let you down. Only the Brave is filled with conspicuous touches of heartiness, of bonding (male bonding) that’s part of the discipline and the teamwork required to face danger practically and get the job. That was the most beautiful and terrible thing I’ve ever seen.īrendan McDonough: I heard you guys had some slots available.Įric Marsh: Do you know what we’re training for?īrendan McDonough: Hotshots get to engage the fire directly. When Supe tells the younger man, “I was you,” it’s obvious how much firefighting can change a life, though Amanda rightly asks him whether he is fighting his substance addiction with another kind of drug.Eric Marsh: I worked this blaze near Big Timber, Montana, in the blink of an eye there’s fire everywhere, and then charging out of these flames comes this bear on fire. Amanda and her husband have big arguments about the big subjects, from recovery to having children to the acceptability of reckless behavior according to gender. With their uniform yellow fire-resistant shirts, relative anonymity and easy camaraderie, they are very much like soldiers.īut the strongest connections in the film are drawn between Amanda, Supe and Donut, who we learn are all recovering addicts. Unfortunately, many of the 20 firefighting characters are hard to distinguish, partially due to all the droopy mustaches they wear. The cast also includes Supe’s wife Amanda (a wafer-thin Jennifer Connelly), and the politically-connected fire chief Duane Steinbrink (Jeff Bridges, teasing but not doing enough country singing).Īll the women in the picture must cope with the fact that the Hot Shot outpost is a highly masculine space, where every inner bicep has a tattoo of a fierce animal and beer bottles are sometimes opened with chainsaws. Other key pieces include Supe’s second-in-command Jesse (James Badge Dale, a good fit with the boys as he was in “13 Hours”) and his trainee Chris (Taylor Kitsch), a guy who’s just a little too old to be sleeping on your couch surrounded by beer bottles.Īfter some friction during initiation, Donut and Chris bond so well they become bosom buddies who enjoy fun evenings of babysitting for Donut’s daughter. His most hapless aspirant is Brendan “Donut” McDonough (Miles Teller, looking like his eyebrows are already partially singed off), a recovering addict just out of jail on a larceny charge. He is also doggedly transforming his trainees from second stringers to elite Granite Mountain Hot Shots. Supe is an intriguing character, one who gets into the metaphysical elements of firefighting: he has chats with the flames and often finds an incandescent bear running through his dreams. The ominous mood starts when wildland fire supervisor Eric “Supe” Marsh (Josh Brolin), reaches a peak on a training run with a new batch of firefighters and tells them: “Breathe in this beautiful vista.” He quickly adds an important caveat that, after a year in fighting wildland fires, when the men look at all those vibrant trees they’ll see them only as fuel. Though it’s billed as a biographical drama, “Only the Brave” is as scary as any Halloween horror flick.
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