Promised Land

Matt Damon tries his hand at screenwriting for the first time since Good Will Hunting (let's forget arthouse dud Gerry; everyone else has), reuniting here with that movie's director Gus Van Sant. Damon plays Steve Butler, a representative for a massive natural gas company who goes from one almost bankrupt farming town to the next along with Sue (Frances McDormand), giving locals a large sum of money in return for allowing them to drill for gas on their land. So far, so Erin Brockovich in reverse, and everything seems to be going great until a real life Erin Brockovich shows up. Dustin Noble (John Krasinski) is an activist with evidence of Butler's company irreversibly ruining farms in the towns they previously set up shop in. Thus begins a battle for the town's soul; will the townsfolk give in to the lure of money at the potential cost of their livelihood?

It's an interesting set-up, and one that's presented from the rather unique point-of-view of "the bad guys". But these bad guys, Steve and Sue, seem to be genuinely nice people, and the argument for or against fraking - the term for gas drilling - and its potentially hazardous side effects are never effectively presented. The issue of fraking is an important one, but it feels like a total MacGuffin here, just something to pin a threadbare plot on to. There is almost as much time spent developing Damon's burgeoning relationship with local teacher Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt), and while that subplot starts out nice, it gets into some real soap opera-y waters towards the end.

This is Van Sant's most formulaic movie since, well, Good Will Hunting, but it would've been nice if the story had been taken in a more interesting direction. Bar one late-in-the-day revelation, Damon's script - co-written by Krasinski, based on a story by best-selling author Dave Eggers - is all too predictable, but never necessarily crosses the line into boring. It also helps that neither Damon nor McDormand are humanly capable of ever giving a bad performance, and you'll enjoy your time spent with these two.

Sadly, what should have been Matt Damon's Michael Clayton, is instead just Matt Damon's Frustrating Missed Opportunity.