Reel Entropy

Tom Hanks has almost always been overrated, and he’s really gone off the rails in his last couple of performances. In Sully, as in Bridge of Spies, he’s playing a real-life everyman who did something extraordinary who he clearly has a ton of respect for, so he adopts his super-cheesy “badass Tom Hanks” persona. It’s nothing like how we know Sullenberger behaves from interviews. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

In January 2009, Chesley Sullenberger successfully ditched a commercial airliner in the Hudson River, averting what would have been a massive plane wreck. Now, Clint Eastwood has made things right by making a biopic about him that is just as big of a wreck as the one he avoided.

Sully is the true story of Sullenberger (Tom Hanks), that fateful flight and its aftermath. Heading out of LaGuardia Airport in New York City, Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) run into a flock of geese that destroy both engines, turning their passenger airliner into a very expensive kite at just 2,818 feet. Instead of crashing into the most densely populated city in the world and killing everyone on board and hundreds if not thousands of pedestrians, Sullenberger glided the plane onto the Hudson River, a course of action which caused no one to die. The movie centers around an internal investigation from three unnecessarily antagonistic stooges who are terrible at their jobs (Mike O’Malley, Jamey Sheridan and Anna Gunn) trying to answer the question, “Would it be better if he’d just let everyone die?”

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