Okay, and the raid is some excellent filmmaking, but Chastain is weak and it drags

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2013)

Not bad, but I'm really at a loss to explain critics tripping over their own feet trying to exalt it. The story is interesting, but, of course, this being a movie, you have to take its history of events with a grain of salt, which makes it kind of worthless in that respect. Cinematically, the raid sequence is by far the highlight, and definitely one of the best sequences of the year (I didn't time it but it had to run for 30 or 40 minutes), but after that it's fairly pedestrian. And I've gone from a waffling Jessica Chastain skeptic to full-on Jessica Chastain denier. She's very mediocre in this film, having little presence and delivering her big lines with no conviction ("I'm the m.f.er who found this" had my eyes rolling hard). Since most of the story revolves around her, I didn't find anything in particular to attach to. I wasn't bored, per se, but I wasn't much interested, either. The character doesn't even do much. Her big break comes straight from someone else's hands. The best you can say about her is that she's the one who insisted upon it. The Jennifer Ehle subplot is so embarrassing you hope like Hell it never really happened, and, as far as the filmmaking is concerned, it's one of the worst sequences of the year, at least in a major film, so telegraphed and drawn out that if I was watching it on DVD I probably would have just skipped to the next chapter. There aren't any standout performances in the film, but I was happy to see Harold Perrineau, Mark Duplass and Chris Pratt show up. All in all, it is definitely worth seeing, but don't expect much.