Jenna Ortega has made a career for herself revitalizing roles that originated in the 1990s. In the most obvious case, she’s the new Wednesday Addams in one of Netflix’s biggest hits. In both Scream and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, she played spiritual successors to classic horror heroines. She’s not entirely stuck in the past, however. Ortega also finds time in her busy schedule to appear in total misfires. The worst of which, according to Rotten Tomatoes, is Finestkind, a Paramount+ hit.
Writer/director Brian Helgeland has earned far more praise for the former than the latter. He has the Tom Hardy film Legend, the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, and the Heath Ledger epic A Knight’s Tale under his belt. He also wrote all of those films, along with real hits like L.A. Confidential and Mystic River. By the way, Finestkind is actually his fourth-worst-reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes.
Jenna Ortega Does Fine in Finestkind
Finestkind follows a pair of half-brothers who operate a scallop fishing vessel as their lives fall apart. Their dad is sick, and their actions have racked up considerable financial debt. This terrible circumstance forces the brothers to partner with a criminal operation in a one-time heroin trafficking operation. Enter Jenna Ortega as a low-level drug dealer who hooks up with one of the brothers and facilitates the deal. No, she’s not the star of the show, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a headline about this film that doesn’t mention her by name. We can all agree the main goal there is capitalizing on her star power; I’m no different than the rest. The secondary objective is to cover for how blisteringly boring every other aspect of Finestkind happens to be. It’s like a miserable, nautical Breaking Bad without any of the dramatic tension.
Finestkind had a long, tortured development period. The stars, Ben Foster, Toby Wallace, and Jenna Ortega, weren’t the film’s original headliners. Finestkind was originally Finest Kind, and its cast included Jake Gyllenhaal, Ansel Elgort, and Zendaya. That change likely wouldn’t have moved the needle much. The problems in this film have nothing to do with the cast, and the altered actors probably wouldn’t have rewritten the script. As critics were quick to point out, Helgeland’s writing and directing felt entirely borrowed from other, better projects. It’s a thriller that feels too familiar to ever actually thrill. The tone is utterly suffocating, in a way that suggests a genuine nihilistic horror film in a previous version of the script. It’s hard to believe the man who wrote L.A. Confidential wrote this, but it’s very easy to see it come from the mind behind Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.
Finestkind dropped straight onto Paramount+ after a TIFF premiere late last year. It’s the most-watched film on the service this year, maintaining a consistent spot in the top ten every day of 2024. As someone who follows those shifting metrics, I can honestly say that Finestkind’s more-than-fine performance is a sign of Paramount’s low selection and not a sign of the film’s high quality. Fans of the film probably didn’t seek it out for Ortega’s brief role. Maybe they just like sailing, gruff family arguments, or heroin.
