The fire-fights are pretty well done..just don't expect any answers to the hard real-life questions on why.

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2016)

I expected nothing when I watched this and had no preconceived ideas about the Bengazi attacks. All I knew about the incident was that 4 Americans had died and nobody had a good answer why.
If I had to compare any other movies to it, I'd say "Blackhawk Down" and "Hamburger Hill" with a dash of "Navy Seals". The movie has nominally engaging characters, however at over two and a half hours long, it could have been cut much tighter. You could safely start watching the movie at the 40 minute mark and miss nothing much. If you roll your eyes during the personal stuff in action movies I'd say just do that. The first portion of "13 hours" is spent on character development and building tension. (Angry Libyans, a jackass of a CIA chief who doesn't believe there's any threat, buildings that have no security barriers, indifferent and underpaid Libyan guards, not enough weapons and so on). However the first 40 minutes doesn't do anything to add enough to the story not to just skip over it. The character development is clumsy and trite, the dialogue is of the comic-book variety, and in all that screen time you barely learn enough to be able to tell one character from another, sometimes.
When the action starts though, it is very good. Enough to say the fire-fights in "13 Hours" probably aren't going to be like anything you've seen before. Most of it might put you on the edge of your seat and here, at least, the film is very tight. The action parts alone makes this movie worth watching.