![]() ![]() I have always been willing to overlook politics I find personally repugnant-from the Stalinist hymns of the Soviet montage theorists to the quasi-fascism of John Milius-if the films themselves were artistically triumphant. That’s not a slam against Krasinski, per se: given the meager material he’s given to work with he manages to deliver the one emotionally impacting performance in the whole film.Īll this I could suffer if 13 Hours demonstrated even a modicum of technical acumen. Through the majority of the film I couldn’t tell any of the soldiers apart from each other, the sole exception being John Krasinski (“Jack”) who somehow managed to maintain a babyface beneath his rugged beard. Never before have his protagonists been as scruffy-faced, monosyllabically-named (“Rone,” “Jack,” “Oz,” “Tig,” “Boon”), and interchangeable. In trying to make his Black Hawk Down, Michael Bay has inadvertently made his own The Green Berets-as envisioned by Donald Trump. In doing so, he creates a Tea Party polemic a vivid realization of every ethnic and racial stereotype fostered against Middle Easterners filtered through a lens of American Exceptionalism. 13 Hours isn’t so much a recreation of the SeptemBenghazi attack as it is a paean trumpeting the superiority of the American serviceman. Now we’ve come to 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, a film which by its very nature allows Bay to canonize his precious soldiery and blaspheme the very government they represent. But most of the time we’re left with migraine-enduing patriotic chest-thumping: the miscalculated melodrama of Pearl Harbor (2001) the impotent government officials in Armageddon (1998) the infallible posturing of the US military in the Transformers “saga.” Occasionally these contradictory values result in truly engaging cinema: the justifiably disgruntled Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Ed Harris) who holds the city of San Francisco hostage with chemical weapons in The Rock (1996) remains the most singularly compelling character in Bay’s entire filmography. It’s not enough for his chisel-jawed leads (give Shia LaBeouf a few more years…) to act out preposterous flights of hyper-masculine fancy there must always be a flustered police chief/government official and an oorah-ing squadron of Marines in the background of the finale. ![]() Michael Bay’s career has always been working up to this point, hasn’t it? Since his debut with Bad Boys (1995), Bay’s films have been mired in two obsessions: a near psychopathic contempt for Authority Figures and an ironic idolization of the American military. ![]()
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