★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
It seems customary for every review of 13 Hours to begin with some kind of comment on its infamous
director, Michael Bay, either to poke fun at his staple signifiers or to
question why on Earth he’s been tasked with bringing such a politically delicate
story to the screen. Is anyone really shocked by now that the director of the Transformers movies didn’t have restraint
listed amongst his priorities when there was military hardware and gung-ho
chaos to indulge in?
Taken from the book by Mitchell Zuckoff, 13 Hours details the events of September
11th 2012 when a U.S. compound in Libya was set upon; it’s only
defence a team of six security contractors, tasked with holding the line until
support arrived to evacuate civilians and intelligence personnel.
Let’s clear the air immediately: the men depicted in this
film committed an extraordinary act of bravery and should be remembered for
doing so, which makes the portrayal of them problematic to say the least. Bar
perhaps our two leads Jack (John Krasinski) and Tyrone (James Badge Dale), the
entire line-up are reduced to one-note, totally interchangeable bearded
burlies. It’s bad enough that the entire Libyan population fall under a blanket
of facelessness, but to have the heroes of the story meld into one another is
something else entirely.
Even our two leads are simply going through the motions:
Dale is at least believable and has some small level of depth, but Krasinski is
woefully miscast. Perhaps in a deliberate effort to sully his squeaky-clean
persona from The Office, he’s given
up shaving and taken up body-building, but he’s let down by his innate
harmlessness. In one mid-shot he stands topless, moonlight reflecting off his chiselled
torso but his puppy dog eyes giving the game away.
But let’s face facts; you don’t come to a Michael Bay movie
for well-drawn characters in the same way you don’t go to a Donald Trump rally
looking for the milk of human kindness. No, respectively you go there to have
your face blown off by heavy-handed posturing and…oh, never mind, bad example.
Bay’s particular brand of freneticism is surprisingly effective,
at least to begin with: for situations where the peace is shattered, there’s
shrapnel flying about and lots of people are shouting acronyms you can’t
understand, he suddenly seems a natural fit. That is until we inexorably break away
from immersive pandemonium and into the realm of bonkers, up-to-eleven excess.
You’re no longer filled with the horror of war or the throat-clenching fear of
loss, you’re waiting for the cars to stop mid-chase and metamorphose into giant
robots.
And just like that, everything we expected from the master
of Bayhem comes into play: product placement (including a video game and
console that didn’t exist at the time), copious lens flare with no discernible source,
a refusal to stop the camera fidgeting, and day turning to night in a matter of
moments. The one sane crewmember of the doomed ship Bay, composer Steve
Jablonsky, has finally gone overboard, replaced by Lorne Balfe’s warped, buzzing
soundscape that does little to evade the comparisons to Transformers.
To express annoyance at the political subtext almost seems
to be a mistaken objective: did we ever really expect anything cerebral from
this? This is a film that soils a semi-insightful image of farmers tending to
their cattle even as war commences by having one of our moustachioed macho-men
turn to another and say blankly ‘Surreal…it’s like another world…”
Watching 13 Hours
is tantamount to playing Call of Duty game
with a boisterous teenager who keeps skipping the cut-scenes: watchable to
begin with and competent in its design, but very quickly tiresome, obnoxious
and clueless.
