5.5 out of 10
Personal Bias Alert:
Taylor Kitsch will always be Tim Riggins to me
You can never be sure
what you’re going to get from writer/director Peter Berg. He’s helmed the well-received “Friday Night
Lights” (which led to the television series of the same name), the mixed-bag “The
Kingdom,” and the ridiculous “Battleship.”
“Lone Survivor” falls into the mixed-bag category, feeling very similar
but somewhat lesser than “The Kingdom.” The
action is intense, the narration is sappy, and the characters are slightly
thicker than cardboard.
The
film follows a small team of Navy SEALs on a mission to kill a high-priority Taliban
leader. The mission gets off to a shaky
start when they find the target has a larger security force than anticipated,
but they aren’t deterred until they are accidentally discovered by an unarmed
group of locals. Soon the team finds
themselves pinned down by enemy fire and fighting just to get back home. Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch,
and Ben Foster star as the four-man SEAL team.
As
mentioned, the movie shares many of the same strengths and weaknesses as one of
Berg’s previous films “The Kingdom.”
Both follow a team of military personnel attempting to do their jobs in environments
where the enemy is only hazily defined.
Until someone raises their weapon, you can’t really be sure what side
they’re on. Give Berg credit for the
nuance he brings to these situations; the non-American characters are never
pigeonholed as either friend or enemy.
They are allowed to have varying opinions on America’s role in their
country, and even more impressively are allowed to form opinions on the individual
Americans they meet that are independent from their larger beliefs.
In
contrast, the American characters feel like military hero archetypes. They have wives/girlfriends waiting for
them! They’re competitive! They haze the new guy! These are fine traits to have, but when you
give them to everyone the characters end up feeling like undifferentiated
blobs. The actors give it their best,
but they’re also weighted with clunky dialogue and narration. The scene where they formally haze the new
guy is cringe-worthily clichéd.
But
let’s get real. This is an action movie,
and the action is pretty good. The
bullets and broken bones the characters endure are felt by the audience. The shootouts are well staged, managing to
feel both hectic and confusing without being disorienting. Unfortunately, it all feels repetitive and
drawn out. The first time the characters
crash down a hillside is brutal, but when it happens a second time the fates of
the characters are already a foregone conclusion. Everyone is battered, shot up, and barely on
their feet. Perhaps if the characters
had been drawn better the second leap would have played as a heroic last gasp,
but instead it feels like the filmmakers were drawing out the inevitable. You call a movie Lone Survivor for a reason,
right?
Other Notes:
Ø Unless
you make them into realistic characters, the presence of well-known actors will
take me out of the movie.
Ø As
I sat through the new guy hazing scenes, I tried desperately to figure out why
I recognized the actor who portrayed him (Alexander Ludwig). He played Cato in The Hunger Games.
Ø Taylor
Kitsch pulled off his part well. I still
can’t figure out if the role of Tim Riggins just fit him perfectly, or if he
really is that good of an actor. This
movie makes me lean towards the latter.
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