Patriots Day

Year: 2016
Genre: Drama
Directed: Peter Berg
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, J.K. Simmons, Jimmy O. Yang, Melissa Benoist, Alex Wolff, Themo Melikidze, Michael Beach, Vincent Curatola, Jake Picking, Christopher O'Shea, Rachel Brosnahan
Production: CBS Films

What is this movie trying to say? I ask without a desire to be controversial or contrarian towards the vast ocean of critics and filmgoers who loved this film. I'm aware of the craftsmanship involved in a film like this, I'm aware of the feats it likely took to keep this film tasteful and lord knows that to some, this movie is going to feel like a satisfactory catharsis. In interviews director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have stated the film should be seen as a movie about a city coming together to fight evil. "The more research I did, the more I realized it really was an example of a community working together" said Berg. But despite good intentions and diplomatic words (or lip service depending on how close you are to this), at the end of the day I still need to ask myself, what really, is the point here?

The main story of Patriots Day needs no retelling. I'm sure a lot of Americans are acutely aware of where they were on April 15, 2013; certainly every Bostonian is. The dramatic arc of the movie and part of what makes the movie so "tasteful" is it bends and weaves through the lives of different people intimately involved in the terrorist plot. Such people include Patrick Downes (O'Shea) and Jessica Kensky (Brosnahan), a young couple injured by the first explosion; Officer Sean Collier (Picking), the MIT policeman who was shot and killed in the line of duty; Chinese national Dun Meng (Yang) who was briefly held hostage by the bombers and Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (Simmons) who brought down the elder of the Tsarnaev brothers.

Awww look! He thinks he's helping!

Then of course there's Mark Wahlberg who plays the very fictional and very chuckle-headed Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg); a Boston cop whose story, I think, is meant to serve as connective tissue. His character provides a very insidious discord; not only because his inclusion in everything from the bombing, to the shootout, to the final arrest is downright serendipitous, but because he pulls focus in order to rationalize vigilante justice. He waxes poetically about moral absolutes, gets in the face of investigative brass, jumps every preordained hoop that gets him closer to the bad guys and still has time to weep over the aftermath of the attack. Come to think of it, Wahlberg's not just connective tissue, he's the whole f***ing box and at some point in the film his mugging just stops becoming forgivable.

The other odious element of the film is the inclusion, exploration and exploitation of the Tsarnaev brothers played by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze. They are introduced amid a flurry of intros in the first ten minutes - the score bellowing in minor keys as Tamerlan (Melikidze) watches ISIS videos while consuming Cheerios. Now while there's no inherent problem with heavily inferring these guys are, in fact the bad guys, the movie is supposedly intended to be "about Boston". So why include these characters at all? What insights can be gained about the grit and determination of Beantown from a pair of sad, pathetic, anti-social wannabe terrorists? Nothing - unless the goal of their inclusion is to exploit our fears and make them something more than a pair of sad, pathetic, anti-social wannabe terrorists.

The apparent face of evil.

To that end the film does a pretty fine job being a taut, story beat conscious piece of bluster that elevates what was in reality a messy, painstaking investigation into a simplistic fight between good vs. evil. Meanwhile the Tsarnaev clowns and to a lesser extent the elder's wife (Benoist) are all portrayed as the apex of storybook evil. The kind of evil that only loosely wears a human face. It's a tact that despite being easily digestible is immediately complicated when you consider the younger Tsarnaev is awaiting an appeal of his death sentence and the wife (whom the movie heavily implies knew everything), is still around and bracing for a new glut of death threats.

The real face of hope.

It's interesting to note that Patriots Day is the result of two separate scripts combined to make one big compromised movie. And while you can tell great pains were exercised in the service of this film, the end result still feels like a tug-o-war. There's the fictional composite lead and the true-to-life ensemble. There's the genre cliches artlessly retrofitted with the honest human elements. There's the story of hope in the face of terror, shadowed by an agenda that cheapens the whole ordeal. What's truly lost in the smoke, mirrors and Markie Mark chest beating is the actual story of Boston. A story that could have yielded a rich civic mosaic. Instead what we got was a movie that just reeks of opportunism.

Final Grade: D+