Inconsistent and jingoistic, but it has good points to make.

Rating: 6/10 (8 February 2014)

Peter Berg had to sell his soul to Universal and direct Battleship before he was able to make his passion project of five years Lone Survivor. And now it's made more money than Battleship ever smelt. However, it's hard to say it deserves the honour. There is a lot of passion in the project, but the material is questionable. This may be ironic given my favourite film (The Assassination of Jesse James) but when films rely on the tension of the result that they put on the poster, it's very difficult to invest for me. Captain Phillips and Argo have similar issues and severely lack tension. However, Berg can be decent, he's the guy who directed the first half of Hancock. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the first 10 minutes of Lone Survivor with its powerfully edited montage on the value of brotherhood coupled with surprisingly great cinematography. I'm a sucker for an Explosions in the Sky score too who I'm surprised that Berg has such a strong relationship with.
And then I remembered this is the guy who directed the second half of Hancock. Once the story gets going, it doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't have anywhere to go. All characters are an assortment of clichés with no development to chew on, with rare exception to Ben Foster's engaging performance. Laughably fake makeup and hair really ruins the illusion the writing doesn't give. It spends its time milking the few moral dilemmas that it has before imitating Black Hawk Down's bloodbath on a smaller scale. Suddenly the cinematography and editing I'd been enjoying turn messy. It's unfortunate, but it does pick itself back up by the end. It may be a film that lives in a jingoistic world, but its final points are to make certain exceptions to prejudice. It wants to illustrate that not all Muslims are terrorists and are the true heroes of the story. Little too late to have that open mind but it's a valuable one to have which the film delivers in a moving way even if the characters aren't as strong.
6/10