ACT OF VALOR

This is an action movie about Navy Seals that stars real active duty Navy Seals instead of actors.  Navy Seals are as good at being in the Navy as they are bad at acting.  I think the writers of the film might have been plucked at random from another profession too.  The plot concerns Islamic terrorists teaming up with Latin American drug dealers to smuggle suicide bombers over the US-Mexican border.  If that story sounds like it was ripped form a Chuck Norris TV movie and would be at odds with the supposed realism of this film, yes.

If you eliminated the voice overs and the dialogue, and cut any scenes where no guns are involved, you could salvage this into some kind of commercial for the Navy.  If it didn't already feel enough like watching somebody else play a mediocre first person shooter, don't worry, the directors include a few POV shots of the Seals that imitate that perfectly.

The scenes of the machinery of warfare at work are fun to watch.  A helicopter loads a boat full of men into a river, some gunships repel cartel gunmen, submarines surface, other smaller submarines shoot out of bigger submarines, seals parachute out of planes in clear blue sky and pitch black night, and some seals commandeer a pickup truck for an out-of-place chase scene.

The characters are introduced in bland voice-over, with each one being assigned a random trait that probably won't be mentioned again.  It would have been nice if the seals were interesting people.  Maybe in real life they are.  But here they are given boring lines and they perform them badly.

The film is expertly shot but it is also poorly conceived, monstrously under-written, clumsily edited, and filled with inept performances, empty line readings, and a general dearth of any thought/emotion other than vanilla patriotism.

~ The new suicide vests are supposedly much deadlier than the old models and somebody warns that an attack with them could be even worse than 9/11.  Except that when our heroes have to face a bomber armed with one of these new and improved vests, they simply jump around a corner at the last second and emerge unscathed.  So, maybe not as bad as 9/11.

~ Most of the kills in the movie involve somebody standing next to a wall, at almost the exact same angle every time, and then getting shot, with almost the exact same CGI blood and brain splatter appearing on the wall behind them.  It gets old pretty early.  Pseudo-SPOILER: A key villain gets taken down with a very unprofessional number of bullets.

~ I saw a military funeral in the trailers for this movie, so I knew one of the seals would die.  Then I saw the movie and one of them dies, so they have that funeral.  But damned if I still don't know which of them died.  The boring one?  The white one?  I think it was a guy with short hair.