Bay Goes BLACK HAWK DOWN

Rating: 5/10 (9 January 2020)

Entertaining enough for what it is and reasonably sober-minded, but Michael Bay is absolutely the wrong director for this kind of film. Even his attempt and gritty, claustrophobic realism is seeped in all of his signature high-contrast, saturated, fast-cutting slow-mo chaos that he's so excels in, replete with the iconic bottle rocket explosions. In other words, exactly the opposite sort of vibe you want in your "BIG SERIOUS MOVIE ABOUT BIG SERIOUS THING". In other words, it's PEARL HARBOR all over again, except even more burdened by politics but thankfully free of ineptly-drawn love triangles.
The cast all perform with remarkable aplomb, but these characters aren't particularly deep or complex, and the only reliability seems to come from the actors' natural charisma rather than a particularly good script. Technically everything is equally on-point; Dion Beebe's grainy and nerve-wracking nighttime cinematography has shades of MIAMI VICE '06 and Lorne Balfe's pounding score keeps the tempo up, but it's all stuff that's been seen before and that's been handled better. Like it's direct predecessors BLACK HAWK DOWN and LONE SURVIVOR, 13 HOURS can't seem to decide whether to be a solemn, moment-by-moment documentation of a situation gone horribly wrong, or a CALL OF DUTY speedrun. It's a problem that exists in many war movies, but here Bay's direction just emphasizes the dichotomy with the subtly of a sledgehammer and takes away from what could've been something so much better.