Act of Valor

Firstly, it really should be Acts of Valor, because it’s not singular. There’s more than one person doing it, and the team does more than one. But anyhow, that’s beside the point. Guess what Evan and I watched this Tuesday? No, it wasn’t The Silent Overture (that was playing at The Plaza, and if you missed it – like we did – then you missed out). Instead, Evan and I watched a navy SEAL recruitment video that happened to play at the local megaplex.

Trailers this week were for Safe, GI Joe, The Bourne Legacy, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Lockout, which I mistakenly called as Lockdown. Whoops. I won for Lincoln and Legacy, Evan got GI Joe, and we tied on Safe (the trailer started off with a picture of a safe, so it’s not like we were going with anything else).

The movie itself starts off slowly, with men bonding. Frankly, I could have used a bit less bonding, and bit more SEALing, but that’s just me. Then we get introduced to a terrorist, who blows up a school to get at a diplomat. So we know he’s bad, because he HURTS KIDS! After that, there’s a CIA informant who’s captured, and the SEAL team gets called on to rescue her. Following a debrief, we get an insertion, some tension, and then a bullet-filled extraction.

That action scene is particularly well done. We get some first-person shots looking down the sights of whatever combat rifles they use (M-16s?) and computerized shots from an overhead drone, controlled by the SEAL team leader. The rest of them (except for the sniper) head in and do business, but their extraction is thwarted, so they make their own. Lots of gunfire ensues, until they’re backed up by gunboats and helicoptered out of there.

Information from the raid (the grabbed a cellphone) leads them to a terror plot that seems aimed at the American economy, but I doubt would have that much impact in real life. Regardless, the team (the same one? Do they only have one on station at any time) has to do some globe trotting to stop it. Some gunfights ensue, but they’re a bit harder to follow than the first one. That one was probably the pinnacle of the movie, although there is a longer shootout at the end of the movie.

This movie was like watching a 2 hour episode of Burn Notice, only with SEALs instead of ex-spies. Team goes in, we see some realistic stuff, bad things happen, team follows plot, team has large action scene at the climax. Evan was uncomfortable with the whole jingoism of the movie (the military is depicted as perfect), but I managed to ignore it since it’s what happens on TV most of the time.

There was a giant cliché that I really didn’t like, but they needed it for the framing device. A lot of the dialogue felt really forced, especially the bonding scenes (but that's probably because they used real SEAL members as actors). Yes, we get it, these guys are friends even when they’re not blowing stuff up. But I’d never say some of those things to my friends. I’d say them way more realistically.

The music was pretty good. The fight scenes were good, if occasionally confusing. There wasn’t a whole lot of humour, because you can’t ask military guys to have comedic timing. One or two laughs, but that’s about it. Still, if you can get past that, and the stilted dialogue, there’s a good movie in here, filled with all sorts of real-world tactics. And that’s about all that I asked. Blu-Ray movie for me, but others might not be so accepting of the American armed forces.