Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

‘Out of the Furnace’ fires blanks

A testosterone-drenched, Oscar-baiting homage to ’70s cinema with a heavyweight cast, Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace’’ is much longer on style and belligerence than actual substance.

Christian Bale and Casey Affleck play Russell and Rodney Baze, ill-fated, blue-collar brothers in a Pennsylvania Rust Belt town.

It’s 2008, and Russell (Bale), who works in the local steel mill, gets sent to prison after he kills a man in a drunk-driving accident.

When he gets out four years later, Russell manages to get his old job back, but it’s clear the mill may not be operating much longer.

Younger brother Rodney (Affleck), a war veteran, is suffering from post-traumatic stress after four tours in Iraq.

Without Russell to help out financially during his incarceration, Rodney gets so far behind in his gambling debts to sleazy bookie Petty (Willem Dafoe) that he’s been paying them off by competing in bare-knuckle fights.

Much to Russell’s alarm, Rodney begs Petty to get him into a big match sponsored by New Jersey hillbilly meth dealer DeGroat (Woody Harrelson). DeGroat does not react well when the fighters don’t follow his scripts for the fixed matches — a problem for Rodney.

We discover what kind of murderous mayhem DeGroat is capable of right from the film’s opening scene, where he shoves a hot dog down the throat of his date at a drive-in movie — and reduces a bystander who’s unwise enough to try and come to her rescue to a bloody pulp.

There’s not much in the way of surprises in the doom- and foreboding-laden script by Cooper and Brad Ingelsby, which has nothing especially profound to say about the fate of returning veterans or people facing the loss of manufacturing jobs. Except that their prospects, like the characters in this movie, are bleak.

The little-known and insular multiracial subculture in the Ramapo Mountains adjoining an affluent section of North Jersey — where an armed Russell goes searching for Rodney after the match — might have made for an interesting movie. But the filmmakers exploit it strictly for local color. Specifically, the color red.

Cooper, who directed Jeff Bridges to a surprise Best Actor Oscar for “Crazy Heart,’’ for the most part encourages the actors — especially Harrelson — to chew the beautifully photographed scenery.

Shouting his lines with choked anger, Affleck hasn’t been this mannered — and, frankly, annoying — since “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,’’ which somehow brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for that little-seen Western.

Sam Shepard, as the brothers’ taciturn uncle, and Forest Whitaker — as the police chief who married Russell’s ex-girlfriend while he was in prison — are on hand strictly to lend gravitas to a film that’s already extremely heavy going.

Zoe Saldana has little to do in the thankless role of the ex-girlfriend, who is off-screen for most of the film.

Bale, who can overact with the best of them, uncharacteristically underplay Russell — and it works with so much hamming going on around him. Too bad his character, like everyone else’s, is so thinly written.

“Out of the Furnace’’ is obsessed with a certain Oscar-winning Best Picture from 1978 with which it shares a Pennsylvania setting. It even throws in a gratuitous deer-hunting scene — just in case anyone misses the homage.