The film’s heart may be in the right place, but a melodramatic score, pastoral cinematography and deeply sentimental character arcs make for an altogether mediocre drama, not an urgent thriller. The characters’ fates aren’t altered by it the stakes remain as they were before disaster strikes. The film could still function if the tornado were elided. Instead, 13 Minutes doesn’t explore how the short period of time during which a disaster lasts can feel like an eternity – rather, it rushes past it. The Day After Tomorrow, a disaster flick that mined its environmental catastrophe to either build or wreck the relationships of its characters, burrowed into the cataclysmic event to incite their growth or deterioration. Meanwhile, the tornado doesn’t come to raze the town until the end of the second act, and when it does, it lasts for but a moment. While all worthy topics, they’re each fighting for screen time, smacking ultimately of the perfunctory identity tokenism of something such as Paul Haggis’s Crash. Yet everyone’s plights seem plucked out of a list of trending buzzwords – ideas around immigration, a woman’s right to choose and a person’s right to love whomever. Gossling has freighted each of her characters with a meaty story, and her cast play them in a way that does justice to the pain they must feel. Insofar as its saccharine, Lifetime-movie-esque depiction of the bigness of small-town lives, 13 Minutes works. Finally, there is Ana (Paz Vega), who is trying to save enough to buy a home for her and her husband, Carlos (Yancey Arias), an undocumented immigrant. The local weather person is Brad (Peter Facinelli) his wife, Kim (Amy Smart), is head of the local emergency response team. The town gynecologist is Tammy (Anne Heche), a pro-lifer and parent to Luke (Will Peltz), who is gay and afraid of coming out to his parents. Thora Birch is gravely underutilized as Jess, a mechanic whose 19-year-old daughter Maddy (Sofia Vassilieva) learns that she’s pregnant and debates whether she should get an abortion. It flicks through the lives of four families with the pace of a miniseries. The film is pure soapy drama, a collection of tales jumbled together, with the tornado an incidental element.
It’s categorized as an environmental thriller about a tornado upending a rural community – but there aren’t many thrills here. Starring Thora Birch, Anne Heche and Amy SmartĬanadian director Lindsay Gossling’s 13 Minutes is a curious thing.Written by Lindsay Gossling and Travis Farncombe.
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