Die Hard with a feisty CIA heroine - don't forget the popcorn and Coke

Rating: 3/10 (23 March 2014)

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is very much like the food we see in ads, it looks the part, but that's about as close as it we comes to being food. In advertising food photography, white paint doubles up as double cream and dishes are lavished with dry ice to appear steamingly hot for the brief tenths of a second when the photo is taken. This film looks the part, but otherwise . . .
Some might think that 9/11 and the hunt for the baddie who was ultimately responsible is - I've heard it said - the most important event of the 21st century. Well, quite apart from the fact that the century still has another 76 years to go, chalk that up to US hooey. And, from where I stand, also chalk up to US hooey that they are 'the good guys' and that anyone who is not on their side and whistles the same patriotic tunes, is thus agin them and by definition 'a bad guy'.
To be fair in a nation of close on 300 million there are plenty of dissenting voices appalled and embarrassed by some of their administration's practices - and it doesn't matter whether that administration is Democrat or Republican. (I personally find it extremely hard to stomach the official Yankee line that the United States of America is the centre of the universe. As it happens the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans and we British also once thought that, and look what happened to all their respective glory.) Bigelow seems - and I must stress seems, because there is so little real thought in her film that maybe she didn't even consider it - that as the US is 'the good guy', it ain't bad when it uses torture. In fact, given the US's self-defined role of saving the world from assorted 'bad guys', torture can, in fact, be a good thing. Again to be fair, when the film came out, the CIA were horrified and insisted it had never used torture and we must take it by its word.
That denial wouldn't, however, explain Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and the many admitted incidents of 'extraordinary rendition'. And isn't it odd, by the way, that when something unacceptable is done, there's a feeling that if we call it something else and use a euphemism, that something becomes half as bad. Then there's the central fact of this film which I shall call the murder of Osama Bin Laden, but which others claim can't be 'murder' because he was 'a bad guy'. But that's enough liberal ranting.
As for the film, well despite the subject matter, it is really nothing more than Die Hard Part 17, with artsy hand-held camera work. According to Bigelow (who prefaces her film with that weaselly giveaway that Zero Dark Thirty is based on 'first hand accounts of actual events' which actually means nothing whatsoever but gives the film a spurious sheen of 'truth') the capture of Bin Laden was all down to the sterling, tenacious work of one dedicated woman, a woman, furthermore, who was feisty enough to best the men who stood in her way and wouldn't take no for an answer. So far, so nauseatingly Hollywood.
As for characterisation, well there is none. which is a bit of a bummer for a film which comes in at over two and a half hours. In fact, there's really nothing much else except several hours of our feisty heroine being feisty (but human enough to shed a tear at the end of it all - aaahhh.) My advice: if you like Die Hard style films, stick to Die Hard because at least you're not expected to take it seriously.