There was a time when talky slabs of recent political history like “The Brink of War,” carried by skilled name actors who aren’t quite stars, were largely the preserve of Emmy-chasing TV networks. Today, with a bit of added Christian-right rhetoric, they’re ready for the big screen, as the growing faith-based film industry expands its palette in terms of subject matter — but not cinematic style, as evidenced by this dutifully drab gray-flannel enterprise from writer-director Michael Russell Gunn.
The latest from so-called “values-based” distributor Angel Studios comes hot on the heels of their Fourth of July release “Young Washington,” which has drummed up nearly $47 million in theaters, and shares with that Great Man biopic the kind of textbook American patriotism that recalls, well, a certain kind of textbook. The story of how the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the next year’s nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, it feels veritably designed (right down to its PG rating) to bore kids in history classrooms for generations to come. Adult audiences may be more willing when “The Brink of War” opens wide on Friday, but it’s doubtful they’ll be much more entertained.
