Reasonably good, action-drenched depiction of the 2012 Benghazi attack

Rating: 7/10 (6 May 2020)

Following an attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, a group of CIA operatives and private military contractors mount a bloody defence of a CIA outpost against mobs of heavily armed jihadists. I have no experience by which to judge 'combat' scenes in films but the battles in this seemed realistic, and were certainly exiting and well done. Director Bey (whom I associate with sophomoric action-adventure fluff and with crap such as 'Armageddon' (1998) and 'Pearl Harbour' (2001)), reins himself in somewhat, and other than a couple of trite 'slow motion, back-lit, group-walks toward the camera' and a gimmicky freeze-frame shot of a mortar shell descending followed by a Forrest Gump-style image of a singed baby-picture floating though the smoke, eschews his usual over-the-top pyrotechnics. The cast is fine (admittedly I found most of the main characters more-or-less interchangeable), as was the script/story, (although a bit too many tough-guy, bro-binding exchanges and family-time cutaways designed to humanise the rugged (American) bearded-killers). The jihadi bearded-killers don't get much back-story as they are methodically mowed down but I found the final scenes of their families coming to mourn to be more affecting than the corresponding scenes in the CIA compound. The film has some similarities to Ridley Scott's superior 'Black Hawk Down' (2001) but lacks the palpable tension that Scott deftly builds in his story of desperate, out-numbered, elite fighting men. The historical accuracy of the film has been debated but considering the players involved, what really happened may never be made public. All-in-all, watchable (for fans of this kind of border-line jingoism) and not bad for a Michael Bey opus (and a great ad for armoured Mercedes Benzes).