Thirteen days of fear and tension. Thirteen days of crisis. I remember those thirteen days very well. Is a Long Time in the Theater. A great, largely true story.
Some good action sequences.
A few effective performances. Some performances are ineffectual. Under the cover of building a base for a fishing fleet, the Russians began to construct intermediate missile sites on Castro's island, similar to those with which we had ringed Russia. Greenwood is excellent as JFK, but Thirteen Days is only fitfully entertaining and, too often, makes puzzling and fruitless dramatic decisions. For a political film to work, then, it needs to minimize a double helping of scorn and suspicion and that, I fear, is a task with which few films have ever been the equal.