Tension is well-built in spite of the episodic nature of the film

Rating: 8/10 (8 March 2016)

Hollywood biographical war pictures are used as devices to mark significant events of terrorism, a form through which we comprehend accounts of reality and glimpse on the American psyche. Over the last few years we have Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), and American Sniper (2014), to name only a few. For 2016, Michael Bay leads the strain of contemporary soldiers flick in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.
No stranger to true story war films, Bay has directed Pearl Harbor way back 2001. The film opened to mixed reviews on its failed attempt to be the Titanic equivalent of war films. Bay has the history of directing overly-ambitious films run by his love for visual cacophony—extreme dose of chaos, explosions, CGI, lens flare, and other cheap tricks. He is a little kid left in the nursery room, one that gets his jollies all over the place and blows everything into Michael-bay pixels—a phenomenon we fondly call the "Bay-ism". I have to swallow my subconscious hate for the man, however, after seeing 13 Hours—an actually good action film. Sure, the heavy use of exploding stuff is still present but in the film's case explosion is recurrent and central to the story.
13 hours takes us to the actual events that transpired on September 11, 2012 when a series of attacks stormed the U.S. embassy and CIA compound in Benghazi, Libya. The action focuses on the six-man team of private military contractors: headed by the alpha-leader Rone (played by James Badge Dale), with former jarheads Jack, Oz, Tig, Tanto, and Boon (played by John Krazinski, Max Martini, Dominic Fumusca, Pablo Schreiber, and David Denman, respectively). Being the sole security of the CIA outpost and the thirty CIA desk agents/officers housed inside, together they fight-off and hold Libyan terrorists long enough for a back-up team to arrive—a plan of which they are uncertain. This occurs for a 13 bloody long hours. Easier said than done.
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