Pressure review – Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser can’t save lower-tier D-day drama

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A behind-the-scenes second world war drama focused on the importance of weather is too stodgy and repetitive to work as anything but a so-so TV movie

In a world of increasingly segmented audiences, the new movie Pressure cleverly brings together two adjacent demographics: weather dads and history dads. Those designations are honorifics, not gender-essentialist; spiritually dad-curious people of all ages (but, let’s be real: mostly over 50) may be interested in a behind-the-scenes story set in the last few days leading up to the allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Because this is the largest-scale seaborne invasion ever mounted, weather is a major factor, and the movie follows military higher-ups as they work around the clock trying to figure out whether a possible incoming storm will create unfavorable or impossible conditions.

To put it in contemporary terms, this is essentially a movie about Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) nervously refreshing his weather app to see if he needs to change his upcoming plans. The weather app is played by Andrew Scott. Scott’s actual character is James Stagg, a somewhat brusque and chilly Scotsman brought in to the D-day planning as the operation’s chief meteorological officer. Stagg quickly clashes with the American Irving Krick (Chris Messina), who knows that D-day is crucial and time is of the essence – and is therefore bullish about (selectively) using past data to “predict” that the storms will quickly pass. Stagg’s analysis is far less optimistic. Anyone who has held tickets to a forecast-dependent outdoor concert will relate.

To the intriguingly discordant ensemble of Scott, Fraser and Messina, Pressure adds the always-welcome Kerry Condon as Kay Summersby, who served as Eisenhower’s secretary during the war. (All of the film’s major characters are real people.) “Men are too fond of that word,” she notes when someone throws around the term “genius”. At first, this seems like a streak of mild cheek in the screenplay, co-written by director Anthony Maras. “Did you know that weathermen are traditionally boring?” Stagg is dryly asked at one point. He concedes that possibility while noting that the weather itself could not possibly be described that way.

This distinction is more correct than the movie would care to admit. While the idea of urgent meteorology being used to determine the fate of a large-scale military operation (and, as such, perhaps the entire war) is indeed a compelling one, the weathermen and those around them aren’t especially interesting. To his credit, Scott comes closest to holding the screen as a man whose scientific allegiance inherently rebukes the certainty that Eisenhower and the others would prefer to hear. He’s a master of gentle seething, a softer-spoken (and sometimes secretly soulful) Benedict Cumberbatch. For that matter, Fraser is fun enough (if not exactly chameleonic) as an impatient but not unfair Eisenhower.

The overriding problem is not the performances; it’s that they’re in service of repetitive character dynamics, all presented in the usual Focus Features palette of cool blues accented by military-jacket greens and browns. Meetings are held, Eisenhower demands answers, Krick insists that the mission needs no delay, and Stagg corrects him, as Summersby stands by and attempts to smooth things over – especially once Stagg hears that the pregnant wife he left at home may be in danger. Minor variations on this cycle unfold repeatedly, and when Maras attempts to broaden his scope with dramatization of the actual invasion (spoiler alert: D-day did occur), it betrays the movie’s attempts at a smaller-scale pressure-cooker, all for some poor-man’s-Saving Private Ryan montage work.

It would be delightful to report that this intersection between nerdy science and military history is a crackerjack dad movie, but Pressure never digs far enough into the procedural detail of its dual subject areas, especially Stagg’s expertise in meteorology. That kind of immersive nerdery would distinguish the project from any number of better thrillers – or a lower-tier made-for-HBO movie from 2002. Despite a few sparky face-offs between the actors, Pressure feels destined for a less notable fate: to cause plenty of armchair naps once it hits streaming.

• Pressure is out in US cinemas on 29 May, in the UK on 9 September and in Australia on 29 October

• War films
• Brendan Fraser
• Andrew Scott
• D-day
• Drama films
• reviews