BEFORE: I skipped a movie on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning because I went out with some ex-co-workers, a little get-together of people who had all worked at the same animation studio over the years. We went to a bar that hosted a Taco Tuesday promotion, and it was a bar I used to go years ago that had a great beer selection, but then became a tequila bar for a while. But it changed hands and is now back to featuring craft beers, and they just added a bunch of stouts to the line-up, so that made me very happy.
Linking from "The Expendables", Bruce Willis was also in "The Last Boy Scout" with James Gandolfini (last seen in "Angie").
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Hurt Locker" (Movie #704), "Green Zone" (Movie #871)
AFTER: Well, I promised I'd get back to the Iraq/Afghanistan war. Maybe I should have come straight here right after the 9/11 chain, but I had other concerns at the time. This is from the same director as "The Hurt Locker", who won the Best Director Oscar for that, so expectations were high since it features something akin to a similar subject. But there was a whole lot more action in that other film, the extreme tension involved with defusing IEDs was quite captivating. Tracking Bin Laden's couriers and communications, not quite as much.
Don't get me wrong, the closing half-hour is quite tense, featuring the famous Seal Team 6 raid on Osama's compound - and that certain is film-worthy, but it's almost like someone realized they couldn't stretch that out to feature-length, even if it were to play out in real-time, so they added the previous decade of intelligence gathering to fill up another two hours. Witness the marvel of torture and surveillance that ultimately provided the address in Abbottabad.
Most frustrating is the lead character's insistence that her superiors act on her conclusions, as they wait day after day for some more coherent intelligence that never comes. She writes numbers in magic marker that represent how many days they've been sitting on her information, and unfortunately to the home viewer, we feel her frustration as well as we realize that whole sequences of the film are passing by with no real action taking place. It's called editing, guys.
By comparison, at least the vilified torture scenes represent a form of action - I would have recommended keeping those in place and ditching the long period of inaction, but perhaps that's just me. It's perhaps interesting to note that the film was originally developed to be about the UNsuccessful hunt for Bin Laden, and then parts were re-written after the successful raid.
I had a problem watching parts of the raid, not because of the content, but because my living-room TV tends to over-darken if the scenes on a DVD are dark to begin with, I haven't been able to adjust the TV to recognize the fact that some scenes take place at night. Well, hey, "Dark" is right there in the title, but for me it was extra dark. The night-vision shots helped, so at least I could mostly tell what was going on, but at times it was difficult and I had to figure out what was taking place just based on the sounds.
I feel for the guy who had to play Osama, (just listed as "UBL" in the credits) I wonder if he had the same troubles that those actors did who played killers and rapists in the recreation sequences on "America's Most Wanted", namely getting recognized as his character in the real world.
Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "The Help"), Kyle Chandler (last seen in "Super 8"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Harold Perrineau (last seen in "Blood and Wine"), Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong (last seen in "Kick-Ass"), Chris Pratt (last seen in "The Five-Year Engagement"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "The Hard Word").
RATING: 5 out of 10 black sites
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