For they are the best! And everyone knows it! But politics and regulations and, I dunno, taxes get in the way.
The regular army are Type 2s, or “Deucers”, and when we first meet Brolin and his gang they’ve been stuck as Deucers for too long. “Hotshot” isn’t just a nickname, it’s a term to describe a type of wildfire suppression expert. There’s a moment in this film in which Bridges cracks under duress for just an instant and emits a groan that is so heartbreaking, so true and yet so underrepresented in movies that it all but washes away much of the boilerplate machismo of the film’s first half.
Jeff Bridges plays an Arizona emergency services supervisor (exact position is a little vague) and godfather figure to Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) and his guardians of the range, the Granite Mountain Hotshots. But when you’ve got as keen an eye as he does, plus a cache of tough guy performers facing impossible odds, it is extremely effective. Much of the movie is as blunt as the title suggests, and Kosinski leans into it in the third act. Only the Brave follows the same pattern (“What’s it like to be an elite wildfire squad?”) and only if you know that it’s based on a true story do you realise it isn’t going to end so well. It’s really more of a procedural film – “What’s it like to work at an airport?” – with political dealings, romantic woes, a comic side plot and finally some explosives thrown in at the end. This unpredictable quality to Only the Brave ends up being its greatest strength.Ī point of comparison would be the 1970 film Airport, which, thanks to its many sequels, suggest wall-to-wall disaster tension to those who haven’t seen it. Furthermore, the “hangin’ out” sequences with the Granite Mountain Hotshots don’t exactly feel cut from a Richard Linklater film, but it’s in a similar ballpark. This isn’t to imply the sequences of mighty conflagrations aren’t heart-pounding, it’s just that there are fewer than you might expect.
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