Boys' town: "Out of the Furnace"

Though ostensibly a contemporary drama, Out of the Furnace has swaggered into the multiplexes from that corner of the American cinema that will be forever 1978. Right from the off, Scott Cooper's follow-up to the rather more nuanced Crazy Heart puts up its dukes and takes wild, semi-ambitious swings, hoping to connect with the authenticity we associate with that run of films stretching from The Deer Hunter through Blue Collar to Raging Bull. Occasionally, it catches it, and one image around the half-hour mark - of Casey Affleck standing in a cramped kitchenette, cradling a beer in one hand while cupping his balls with the other - might usefully stand for the film entire; Cooper doesn't really need the character to lapse into bare-knuckle boxing, or to start screaming into Christian Bale's face, to further whatever point he's making about entrenched masculinity. This is a problem for Out of the Furnace, which strives to fill a long-seeming two hours with such quote-unquote delicacies.

Bale, it turns out, is the good brother in this equation, returning to his Pennsylvanian backwater after serving time on a DUI charge, determined to make amends with his ex (Zoe Saldana); getting somewhat in the way is Affleck's tearaway younger sibling, an Iraq vet trying to alleviate his PTSD, and mounting debts, by getting into the underground fight racket operated across state lines by jawgrinding methhead Woody Harrelson. Thereafter, Out of the Furnace is principally concerned with men throwing themselves up against other men, while Saldana's decorous schoolmarm looks on, lovely and lovelorn, from the sidelines, because that's pretty much everything women are expected to do in these kinds of filmed cock-measuring contests.

It might have functioned as a bumper, end-of-year compendium of acting, and certainly Bale's unsmiling presence lends it the look of a notionally serious yang to American Hustle's apparently frivolous yin. Harrelson, with the words "FUCK" and "YOU" tattooed on the insides of his fists, at least approaches the material like the borderline DTV concern it is, even if the collective muscle being flexed elsewhere regrettably squeezes Sam Shepard (somebody's uncle) and Forest Whitaker (dutiful cop) to the margins. Narratively, however, it's been dragged not so much from the furnace as right off the scrapheap. Cooper takes a preening age about his scene-setting - hey, look Ma, I'm out in the wilds making a genuine 70s throwback! - before everything simmers away to leave a laughable, bro's-gotta-do vengeance plot that a Danny Dyer or Jason Statham would set about with far less nonsense and many more surprises. To aspire to The Deer Hunter is one thing; to actually send your characters out on a mid-film deer hunt feels terribly like overstatement.

Out of the Furnace is in cinemas nationwide.