Director Scott Cooper is on heat check after scoring big with the out-of-nowhere Crazy Heart a few years ago. Unfortunately, he goes ice-cold about 90 minutes into Out of the Furnace. One of the best casts all year—and not a sour performance among them—features Christian Bale and Casey Affleck as blue-collar brothers in rural Pennsylvania. Affleck is just home from Iraq and fractured. He falls into the wrong crowd (Woody Harrelson being the most dastardly) and winds up missing. The law (Forest Whitaker) is helpless, so Bale goes rogue. That’s where the film starts to drift from a grade-A human drama into a listless revenge flick. The performances never lose their intensity, but unfortunately Cooper’s film loses its way chasing an ending that barely registers.