Review: Though Ambitious and Topical, '13 Minutes' Has Few Surprises
Seemingly billed as a tornado disaster movie, "13 Minutes" is more or less an ensemble drama that overconfidently brings up a number of topics, including race and abortion, and then neatly fades to black on the unscathed white family embracing in relief.
Set in a small mid-western town, the day starts off like any. Jess (Thora Birch) and her daughter Maddy ("Medium's" Sofia Vassilieva) are having issues that involve Maddy's terrible boyfriend (James Austin Kerr) and her newly-discovered pregnancy.
Ana (Paz Vega) is an immigrant working at a hotel who has saved up enough money for a down payment on a small house for her and her boyfriend Carlos (Yancey Arias). Carlos works on a farm for racist Rick (country star Trace Adkins) and his wife Tammy (Anne Heche). That couple has a nineteen-year-old son, Luke (Will Peltz), who is having an affair with their young farmhand, Daniel (Davi Santos), but he's too afraid to come out to his parents to make it work.
Meanwhile, there's Kim (Amy Smart), a news anchor on the local news, her weatherman husband Brad (Peter Facinelli), and their hard-of hearing daughter Petyon (Shaylee Mansfield).
Of course, all seems normal until they track a frightening weather system in which a slew of tornadoes will come together to create a superstorm. But before that, we loll around peeking in on everyone's problems until the warning alarm goes off and everyone panics.
The tornado sequence itself is barely five minutes in length, setting off a second half of the film where we find out where everyone left off, who survived, who will be found, and who will find their happy ending.
Written by Travis Farncombe and director Lindsay Gossling, the script is ambitious in that it wants to tell a bunch of topical stories (better done in other films). There's the tough-talking single mother (Birch), the troubled daughter with the clearly terrible boyfriend, the gay kid with the homophobic parents, the immigrant couple no one respects... and then there's the white family who are pretty much fine until they realize their hearing-impaired daughter is missing in the wreckage of the tornado — without her hearing aid, to boot.
Nothing here is all that surprising or hard-hitting. The disaster is so brief that audiences will feel cheated. This feels like it was supposed to be a TV show on the Country network, a "very special episode" that revolves around a tornado striking the town most likely reflected in the title of the series.
To be fair, it's not a boring film and it certainly kept my attention, but I questioned characters' decisions and felt queasy that the white characters got off the easiest. When doing a film that is trying to show the humanity of immigrants in America, making them suffer the most.... well, maybe that was the point, but perhaps don't pull back on the happy white people to end your movie.
"13 Minutes" opens in theaters October 29th