A gripping, horrifying action movie that loses sight of its soul when the bullets fly.

Rating: 6/10 (12 February 2014)

Not many films would be willing to place a spoiler so squarely in their title, but Peter Berg's Lone Survivor has no such qualms. We know right from the start that Mark Wahlberg - grim-faced, stone-washed, blood- bathed - is the only soldier who makes it back alive from a surveillance mission gone badly wrong. What's surprising about the film is that it still positively thrums with tension, its action beats pounding fast and furious through a gunfight all the more horrifying for the number of casualties we know it must yield. But Berg also loses sight of the men within his soldiers, sacrificing intimacy and nuance for blood and bullets.
Marcus Luttrell (Wahlberg) is one of four elite SEAL team members dispatched on a reconnaissance mission in the mountains of Afghanistan. Together with squad leader Mike Murphy (Taylor Kitsch) and fellow soldiers Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster), Luttrell is on the hunt for notorious Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. While hiking through the rough terrain some distance above Ahmad Shah's suspected hideout, the team run into an elderly goat-herd and his young shepherds. The SEAL team's decision to spare the lives of these possible innocents unleashes a brutal, bruising battle, the outcome of which is tragic and already-known.
The squeamish and faint of heart should look away now. In the hour-long bloodbath that forms the centrepiece of Lone Survivor, Berg has crafted perhaps his most thrilling, bone-crunching action scenes yet. In order to avoid fates worse than capture or death, characters fling themselves off cliffs, crashing headlong and parkour-style into seemingly every rock and tree along the way. Blood dripping down their faces, flesh torn to shreds, the SEAL team limp and lurch across the mountain, a host of nameless Taliban foot-soldiers hot on their heels. There is little respite for the characters, and even less for the audience, who will find their hearts clenched in their chests as bullets fly and lives ebb slowly, devastatingly away.
It's such a virtuoso piece of film-making - edited together in short, sharp bursts - that it's almost possible to forget that Berg hasn't shown us who any of these men really are. There are a handful of moments at the start of the film, when he tries to establish character: one doomed soldier is contemplating getting a horse for his impending wedding; the other has a new wife. But these details aren't enough to provide a genuine depth of connection. By the time war rings out across the mountain, we still don't know much about these four soldiers who have been thrust so senselessly into a bitter, horrible fight for their lives.
The politics of Lone Survivor are also murky at best. In stretching out the ferocious gunplay to such a horrifying extent, Berg's film winds up asking the oddly amoral question: should the soldiers have, after all, decided to permanently silence apparently innocent villagers? The final- act twist in Luttrell's tale - when he must seek refuge from the Taliban hunters - feels exactly like what it is: an exaggerated coda tacked on to drive home the point that, alongside the crazy terrorists, there are also right-minded heroes amongst the Afghan populace. It's a point made so bluntly that the film goes from bruising and believable to odd and over-blown.
That being said, Lone Survivor is dragged back from the brink of mediocrity and excess by its truly staggering action sequences, choreographed so expertly that they actually become harder to watch the longer they go on. Wahlberg serves as a grim, gritty presence at the heart of the film, battered in both body and soul, while Kitsch, Hirsch and Foster provide able back-up despite their characters' woeful lack of depth. It makes for a heck of an action movie, even if it stumbles when forced to confront the thornier politics and complicated morality of its true story.