Disney fantasy for grown-up patriots.

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2019)

The "Lone Survivor" is a movie purportedly based on a real-life story of four Navy SEALs operators conducting a surveillance op aimed at one of the local insurgent leaders in east Afghanistan. The op was botched and nineteen US soldiers lost their lives to a local insurgent force. The sources are rather divergent on the actual strength of the opposing forces, quoting as little as 10 to as much as 100 "talibans", the claimed casualities estimation hovers at around 35 insurgents killed.
So much for the facts. Let us now leave the reason and logical thinking somewhere safe and close the door. The movie is about to start.
1) The intro shows footage of the brutal and thoroughly exhausting selection and training process for the Navy SEALs candidates. This is supposed to convince me, the viewer, that the "frogmen", as they are colloquially known, are THE best of the best, and the toughest of the toughest. It ties nicely into the later part of the movie, when the unhappy four receive multiple gunshot wounds from AK assault rifles and PKM machine gun, in addition of course to falling off 60ft cliffs TWICE. The movie strays firmly onto the fantasy ground when the soldiers survive all of the above and more with only superficial bruising, nicks and non-vital flesh wounds. It would seem the only way to kill a Navy SEAL operative is to puncture his lung and then finish him with a headshot from close quarters.
Of course they remain almost as precise and mobile as when uninjured, owing to, assumedly, their supernatural toughness obtained through training.
2) The insurgents are shown as incompetent imbeciles, who are unable to hit an unmoving soldier propped against a tree, from ten yards away, and who do not know the concept of "cover", but nevertheless possess a degree of primitive cunning and can move with supernatural speed over rough terrain. They are destined to die by the dozen, in grotesque explosions of gore. Their equipment is shown as utterly inferior in every regard. From 7.62x39mm M67 rounds that pencil through tissue and bone without much injury (contrary to real life), through to RPG-7 warheads which manage to not do any damage to anything whatsoever and even fail to create a concussive blast in their most immediate area, even though in reality they are loaded with 1.5 pounds of high-explosives (apart from an instant upgrade in one scene, where a single, almost-self-guided RPG round is enough to literally tear a MH-47 Chinook apart - deus ex machina much?).
Conversely, the US issued SOPMOD M4 assault rifles and associated combat optics are nigh-indestructible but highly destructive, having survived the fall off the cliff and still being as deadly as before the fall. M16 and its derivatives are not the most rugged and reliable of weapons, even before being crushed under the weight of a fully equipped soldier against jagged rocks and tree trunks.
3) The portrayal of SEALs soldiers is in my opinion highly damaging to their professional image. They are shown as spiteful and disrespectful when off the op, going as far as to bully their youngest member into semi-erotic public dance. The director probably wanted to show them as a closely-knit group of friends, where banter and pranks are just part of the daily routine, but the actions come across as really toxic, resembling the Soviet-era inferior treatment of conscripts.
The image does NOT improve when we see them on active duty. Constant bickering, carelessness and ongoing discussions of private lives of soldiers are prevalent. Were these scenes supposed to convince me that the operatives were so extremely professional that they could afford to divert only part of their attention to the actual mission? Bruce Willis and John Malkovich pulled this stunt off in RED, but here, in these circumstances, the attitudes of the operatives give impression of being totally immature, so much so, that the only frogman (Matthew Axelson portrayed by Ben Foster) who maintains focus and tries to concentrate on tasks at hand, comes across as unfittingly tense.
Overall I would advise not to waste your time. "Lone Survivor" does not compare favourably even to similar strictly patriotic titles, such as "Black Hawk Down", "Sand Castle" or even "Code Name: Geronimo" to name the few.
It's a modern pastiche of Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks but there are four walking tanks instead of one, the actors actually have some, more or less cheesy, one-liners to speak throughout the film and the enemy is not a mustache-twirling villain, but a generic Muslim head-chopping leader with a team of generic Muslim redshirts. Even the compulsory Good Muslim character later in the movie fails to rescue the one-dimensional spectrum of the movie.
Grape juice splashes. Avoid.