Chris At The Pictures

This latest real-life retelling makes it a genre hat-trick for the Peter Berg-Mark Wahlberg duet, though the formula is showing signs of wear. Wahlberg stars as a composite character cop, Tommy Saunders, caught up in the events of the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 and the subsequent manhunt.

I’ve so far held Berg in very high esteem after the eye-gouging nihilism of Lone Survivor and tragic visual mastery of Deepwater Horizon, though the latter’s script issues have begun to take deeper root: Patriots Day tends to fall a tad on the flag-waving side. It may entirely depend on where you draw the line between solidarity and jingoism, but I think the film is at least somewhat self-aware enough to avoid such a potentially divisive realm of thinking.  A steely Kevin Bacon plays FBI agent Richard DesLauriers, who impresses upon everyone the dangers of even indirectly mentioning the terrorist’s chosen faith in the immediate aftermath. As the attackers were not suicide bombers but remained at large for several days, this danger is doubly felt.

The film is equally conscious about the inherent coldness of situational recreations, which emerged as a necessity from day one – many felt the decision to make the film so swiftly following the tragedy was a step too far. As the mouthpiece for this disgust, Saunders is the only one to display signs of protest at when a reconstruction of the scene is required for forensic analysis, mere hours after the first blast.

Wahlberg continues to shine as an everyman; though his characters in Berg’s previous movies were based on actual people, they still carried that sense of home-grown loyalty and indiscriminate anguish when their respective worlds collapsed. Saunders is a fictional person, but feels as real as Marcus Luttrell or Mike Williams, in dramatic contrast to the insufferable science teacher from The Happening or the beer-swigging dad in Transformers: Age of Extinction. Berg’s realist style continues to extend to the supporting faces on screen, too. Those introduced in various opening montages (a love-struck young couple, a bright-eyed police officer, a Chinese student) are people first, characters second.

Patriots Day takes the shape of an epic thriller in lieu of a minute-by-minute playback, and (by the very nature of how the events played out) occasionally feels stretched but never overwrought. As the walls close in on the two perpetrators, it feels like a long-gestating climax, for both the police forces and the audience. The finale is respectful and satisfying, but the ‘Boston Strong’ coda emerges completely from left-field. Up until the conclusion, Berg has never allowed displayed the city as a character in itself, the preceding investigation solidly told but the huge array of characters means there’s nothing like the burning urgency of Survivor nor Deepwater. Composer Steve Jablonsky is swapped out for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the haunting Americana of his scores is sorely missed, and endemic of what holds the film back from complete success. It’s a quality effort, but the true emotional core is reduced to bookends.

On April 20, 2010, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time the fires had been put out and the spillage had been capped 87 days later, it had been named the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Being a 14 year-old at the time, with the minimal interest in current affairs that comes with adolescence, my knowledge of the incident prior to this cinematic retelling was limited to the ecological fallout. Not only had I never heard of the Deepwater Horizon itself, it never occurred to me that its destruction even carried an immediate human cost. The great success of the film is that the loss of those eleven men is keenly felt, even if their characterization is slim to non-existent.

Returning from 2013’s rather excellent Lone Survivor is the triple threat of director Peter Berg, leading man Mark Wahlberg, and composer Steve Jablonsky. They take on the day of disaster from ground zero, following rig worker Mike Williams (Wahlberg) as he leaves his wife (a seriously under-utilised Kate Hudson) and daughter to supervise blowout prevention on the Horizon. Upon arrival, Williams mingles with fellow crew members, suffers through uncomfortable encounters with BP moneyman Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich) and is suddenly thrust into the inferno when a pressure accumulation beneath the rig triggers a total meltdown.

I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll happily watch Mark Wahlberg in anything, from his deer-in-headlights performance in The Happening to his comparatively subtle but scorching role in The Departed. Here, we find him somewhere in the middle. He gets a lot of running about to do and dodges a lot of blistering debris, but the strength of his performance is that he sells the good-natured, slightly unkempt labourer in the build-up, so his later good deeds feel completely characteristic (though the film makes the error of playing us a recording of the real Williams before we even get a glimpse of the actor; always something to avoid in biopics).

He shares the screen with a finely-moustachioed Kurt Russel as Jimmy Harrell, the rig’s manager. His main job is to glower at Malkovich a lot, which he accomplishes with aplomb. Dylan O’Brien is also pretty effective in sporadic appearances but is barely noticeable through the layers of mud (and until the credits rolled I was thoroughly convinced it was Evan Peters playing the role).

With the focus initially planted on the humdrum working day of the rig, there’s little need for digital gloss, but when the rig bursts into flame in a series of seat-shaking explosions, the blaze (when seen on a significantly big screen) is enough to burn out the retinas. The physical blood, sweat and tears are also appropriately visceral, and though any gore is toned down in comparison to Berg’s previous picture, the fate that befalls Russell’s character when things go south is sure to induce a good half-hour of sharp winces. Refreshingly, there’s no slow-motion, piano-tinkled attempts to exploit any deaths for entertainment, either, merely a final roll call that says more with just eleven names than any heartstring-tugging music could accomplish.

That said, the score is peak Jablonsky; a collection of sweeping, spinning stringscapes dashed with incidental thrums that speak to an unmistakable milieu of Americana, in which the film is steeped. Sure enough, as Williams turns back from loading life rafts to gape at the pandemonium, the stars & stripes hang intact.

The sight and sound is all very evocative, but a screenplay penned by Matthew Michael Carnahan leaves something to be desired, Carnahan having taken over from previous writer/director J.C. Chandor, who left the project due to creative differences. Chandor made the unintelligible unmissable in Margin Call, and I feel his hand may have prevented the screenplay’s rank and file versus suit-and-tie metanarrative from coming across so blindingly obvious. The labourers are fast-talking, techno-babbling everymen, while the BP reps are smirking, beady-eyed taskmasters with their shirts tucked in so tightly they may as well be robots. Malkovich’s painfully enunciated accent does little to stave off this comparison.

Demonstrably, it was the oversight of those representatives that enabled the catastrophe to take place, but there’s no nuance to the divide at all. Lone Survivor managed to reproduce a harrowing event with minimal flag-waving, but Deepwater Horizon is constantly out to place the blame. Berg effectively combines the dangerous allure of Irwin Allen movies with the real-world gravitas displayed by Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (still the high watermark for the post 9/11 disaster subgenre), but the latter element is somewhat lacking. As he now takes on the Boston Marathon bombings in next year’s Patriots Day, it seems his and Wahlberg’s template for true story dramas is paying off dividends, but one wonders how much longer the formula will last.