Ambitious, sprawling, but falls short

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2013)

Zero Dark Thirty is one of the years most controversial and troubling films. It begins with audio from real-life phone calls from the World Trade Center as people realize that they are trapped and doomed to die. It is a disturbing and heartbreaking opening. But is the film good? In my opinion, not really.
The movie is about the hunt for the terrorist Osama Bin Laden over the span of twelve years. The main focus though, is on a CIA operative named Maya played by Jessica Chastain and her tough-minded and determined pursuit for his whereabouts. Maya barley sleeps or even eats out, and is willing to torture suspects to get information.
Zero Dark Thirty runs at a long two hours and forty minutes. For me, that is too much to take. The movie keeps throwing different events at us. The torture methods, the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan, the list goes on and it is all is quite exhausting. Mark Boal, the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty is a former journalist, and he says the movie was based on a first hand account and he packs enough information for two movies. I would have appreciated more of a documentary approach. More insight into Al-Qaeda and how the terrorists think.
Not to say that the movies does not have its upsides. Jessica Chastain gives the performance of the year worthy of that Academy Award nomination and it is always good to see Mark Strong (playing an American!), Mark Duplass and Kyle Chandler. They all have small roles, but they do their jobs well and Mark Duplass, a usual indie director, injects a small dose of humor in his one scene into a stone cold film. Jason Clarke shows up as a veteran CIA interrogator in the beginning of the film and literally made me shake in fear. He makes his character believably real.
What the movie lacks is the heart pounding suspense that made The Hurt Locker so good. It also lacks some ingenuity. We have all seen this before. The last thirty minutes are devoted to the raid on Osama's compound. The sequence is well shot through the POV of night vision goggles), but their was no suspense and I felt rather bored. To me, Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest disappointment of the year.