Great Battle Scenes But It Takes A Pretty Dull First Hour To Get To Them

Rating: 4/10 (7 September 2018)

Set in Afghanistan, this is based on the true story of four Navy Seals who find themselves in what seems to be a hopeless situation, trapped in an area held by the Taliban with little hope of escape. The movie captures the sense of hopelessness very well, and in that sense perhaps offers an apt metaphor for the entire US war in Afghanistan - a war entered into in a rush after 9/11 that has no truly clear objective and, thus, little way of deciding if or when victory has been achieved and no obvious plan of withdrawal. So as a historical analogy this actually works pretty well. The actual firefight that the four Seals got into with the Taliban is pretty well depicted. The basic problem with this movie is that you have to wait for about an hour before anything - and I mean anything - of interest actually happens.
That first hour is a killer. You get seemingly endless scenes of Navy Seals training; you learn a lot about Navy Seals rituals; you find out that Navy Seals (like everybody else) get lonely away from their wives and girlfriends back home. That's all well established in scene after scene after scene. Yes, I suppose it gives us a bit of a feel for the men who'll be involved in the story - some raw and inexperienced and others battle hardened veterans - but that first hour of the movie could probably have been cut in half without doing any real damage to the story, and unless you're really, really interested in what the basic drag of military life looks like it's pretty hard to stick with this.
All the performances are decent enough. The lead here is Mark Wahlberg, who plays Navy Seal Markus Luttrell, on whose book this was based. Wahlberg and the rest of the cast were all fine. While this movie is ostensibly a tribute to the Navy Seals (and especially those who found themselves trapped in this situation) I appreciated that the movie made clear that the Seals found sympathetic Afghan tribesmen, and that there is also a tribute to them and to the many other Afghans who oppose the Taliban, rather than leaving the viewer with the impression that all Afghans are hopeless Taliban terrorists. I haven't read Luttrell's book. The movie (as is to be expected) apparently takes some dramatic liberties with the story. That doesn't especially bother me, as long as the basics are reasonably accurate.
I'll say again that the battle scenes in this movie are great - but it simply takes too long to get there. (4/10)