Fair’s fair, you can’t very well judge a film on how rough a time the actors had making it. But no one in The Finest Hours, Disney’s crack at re-enacting the US Coast Guard’s famous 1952 rescue of the sailors aboard the SS Pendleton, looks like they’ve had to go through much more than the inconvenience of having to dry their socks on the radiator afterwards, and it has an effect. By all accounts this was a feat of improbable bravery and heroism but the Disney treatment has neatly filed off all the edges, leaving it bland and emotionless. Call these insignificant details if you like, but they add up to a sanitised impression of events. Pine’s heroic arc, framed with a love story around this being the day he’s to ask his station commander’s permission to marry Miriam (Holliday Grainger), is the bit that’s been really undersold. He steers his boat out to sea, constantly having to ride over massive waves that crash down on them, even sending them fully underwater for a few seconds, leaving everyone a bit soggy but all standing in the same position and basically fine, like if you’d dunked a boat of Lego men in the bath. It made me think of Cast Away, and Chuck Noland’s final, desperate break for home on his makeshift raft, and how it felt like he actually might die. None of this is helped by the feeling that bits are missing. It’s suggested early on that Webber once dropped the ball on a rescue mission which resulted in a woman’s death, but it’s left at a hint, disqualifying the film from using it as motivation for his determined trip. Casey Affleck – his performance the best thing in it by some distance – is set up as a model of calm ingenuity under pressure, and we’re told that he knows the ship inside out, but his big idea to take advantage of the machinery on board to let them hand-steer half an oil tanker and keep her afloat doesn’t come across half as brilliant as it sounds. Some more shots showing metal slotting into place, gears grinding, cogs whirring and so on might’ve given us more of this impression. The Finest Hours is in UK cinemas from Friday.