OVP: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

Film: 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
Stars: John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Max Martini, Pablo Schrieber, David Costabile
Director: Michael Bay
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound Mixing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

When it comes to seeing movies in a given year, I will admit that by-and-large almost all of them fall in the middle.  To the right side of this review, you'll see a guide to the movies that I see, and what my star rating for them means, and if you read this site frequently, you'll know that by-and-large most of my reviews are 2-4 stars, with a particular emphasis on three stars.  Most movies are good, they do what they set out to do, and don't fall into the periphery of terrible or marvelous.  And yet, there are those movies that when I see them I'm flummoxed and taken aback.  Sometimes it's because it defies my expectations, being far better than I could have dreamed-a provocative study of a motion picture, one that I know I'll be thinking about for weeks.  And then others are truly jaw-droppingly bad films, so awful it's a wonder that anyone involved didn't raise their hand and say "should we call it a day, because this movie clearly sucks?"  Unfortunately for my Saturday night, 13 Hours was the latter of these two rare occurrences.

(Real Life Doesn't Have Spoiler Alerts) The movie 13 Hours is about the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that occurred in September of 2012.  If your eyes are glazing over already, it's because there have been very, very few news stories in the past five years that have been combed over with more excruciating detail, to the point where not only did I know how many people would live or die, but I also knew them by name thanks to multiple news stories and congressional testimonies on the attacks, particularly those featuring Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  As a result, you know the plot of the movie, and perhaps the only thing I really need to call out is that the focus is not on the most well-known person who died in the attack (Ambassador Chris Stevens, who is a minor character in the movie), but on the six-man Annex Security Team and their efforts to keep American nationals alive during the attacks.

The film at once feels too soon.  It's difficult to review something that is so constantly in the news ($20 says if I watched FOX News today, the word Benghazi would be used at least five times despite most news organizations focusing on Hurricane Harvey and the North Korean nuclear threat) without coming across as glib or insulting.  Indeed, the men who defended the compound in Benghazi deserve our respect and admiration as American citizens, and it was a terrible tragedy.  The movie itself, though, as a work of art doesn't succeed on any level.

The central problem of the movie is that Michael Bay's directorial style is very black-and-white, and more concerned with mammoth explosions and graphic fight scenes than anything approaching nuance, which you need to do with such a sensitive subject.  The explosions work (Bay knows his stuff), but the film's politics remain muddied at best, and approaching propaganda at worst.  Bay, who famously detests the federal government in most of his movies (look at the "little guy" coming from behind despite the government getting in his way in films like the Transformers series), doesn't feature players who would later have a major role in the Benghazi investigation (there are no fictionalized versions of Hillary Clinton or Susan Rice, for example), but they do find time to have a figure of derision named Bob (Costabile), who is played like a moronic fool the entire film.  Bay is terrible about finding shades-of-grey in characters, but man does this figure take the cake, not least of which because his central action in the film (where he tells the men to "stand down," an action that may have led to Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith living were they rescued earlier), was fabricated-a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee deduced that there was no stand down order, despite protestations from conservative media outlets like National Review.  The film is riddled with conservative dogwhistles, not-so-subtle attacks on President Obama, Clinton, and Rice, and on the federal government in general, and is the closest I've seen to a propaganda film in a major Hollywood motion picture in a long time.

The film received one nomination at the Oscars, likely due to Greg P. Russell's longtime pedigree with AMPAS (though thanks to violating Academy campaigning rules, his nomination was rescinded but the remaining sound mixers kept their nominations), and the sound is to be expected from a Bay film: loud, buzzing, and constant.  It doesn't have the unique precision that I recall from the Transformers movies, and there are moments where the dialogue is over-powered unnecessarily by the gun fighting (though, considering that the script is rife with toxic masculinity and heteronormative cliches, this may be a blessing).  All-in-all, there's nothing really special in the sound, and as a whole it is more a case of AMPAS nominating the "most" rather than the "best" sound on display here.

Honestly, about the only thing this film recommends itself to is for Office fans to marvel at Jim and Roy (actors John Krasinski and David Denman) fighting on the same side.  We don't even get some exploitation of Krasinski's much-commented upon physique (he went the Chris Pratt in Zero Dark Thirty route).  All-in-all, this was a terrible movie, one that felt at once too soon and too political, but without anything interesting to lend to itself other than a series of explosions.