13 Hours: It's Not Terrible

I have to start by docking this movie some points for inaccurate advertising. It's only 2 hours and 24 minutes long, and I'm still not sure how the promotional team missed this one while they were naming it.

So I jest, but I must acknowledge the fact that having watched 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, I can confidently say that I have finally seen a Michael Bay movie that didn't completely suck in just about every conceivable way. It's a far cry from the best movie and even the best war movie I've seen, but it's also much more effective and affecting than I expected it to be, and some of the one-star reviews out there - most notably a rare miss from those carrying on Mr. Ebert's site after his death - seem more interested in reviewing the politics of the movie than they do in actually reviewing the movie, even if those politics don't go far beyond the usual gung-ho military brotherhood that we have seen in so many other movies. Those who say otherwise are probably reading into the intentions of the filmmakers way more than they should. Personally, I don't really care whether or not Jordan Hoffman from The Guardian trusts military contractors and likes Hillary Clinton or not. I care whether the movie is well-written and executed or not, and in all honesty, Bay does a considerably better job with 13 Hours than he did with his Transformers movies. Granted, there are still some glaring flaws in the film that must be addressed, but I legitimately found myself liking this movie leagues more than I had assumed I would. This movie is many things, and terrible is not one of them.

For those of you unaware of the history surrounding the movie, Libyan insurgents attacked a US diplomatic compound in the city of Benghazi on September 11th, 2011, and into the morning of September 12th. Six security volunteers, ex-special forces US soldiers, defended the compound from repeated attacks by separate militia factions, consisting of hundreds or possibly even thousands of armed men. This 2016 movie simply chronicles the battle on the ground, and steers clear of the complicated and heated political discussion surrounding the whole incident in Benghazi. And that's pretty much the whole movie right there. By its own merits as a movie, 13 Hours isn't complicated in the slightest.

At the beginning of 13 Hours, we're given a solid little history lesson about the conflict. It's interspersed with real footage from the conflict, filling us in on what we need to know while also effectively reminding us that the stuff we see in the movie really did happen, even if there may be some dispute over some of Bay's narrative decisions. Practically, some of the color grading in 13 Hours is way too harsh, and the saturation of the movie - how colorful it is in regular talk - could be seriously toned down. I also don't appreciate the constant shaky cam and wish that the technique had been toned down or at least used more sparingly. And this is merely to nitpick, but there is one establishing shot in the movie labeled with the time of day - 8:40 PM. The only problem is that it is very obviously not 8:40 PM in the shot, and the sun is still relatively high in the sky. But all of that said, 13 Hours is actually relatively restrained, at least by the standards of a Michael Bay flick, and I appreciate his relative patience before diving into blowing stuff up real good. The movie is also a touch more personal than I was expecting, far more than the Transformers movies, for what that observation is worth.

But for all of this surprising patience, the first act of this movie drags. It doesn't accomplish enough, merely acting as ambling filler before the big shootout setpiece this movie is built around. 13 Hours would have been better off choosing a different, less obvious angle or writing another subplot or two to put some more meat on its bones. But once the whiz-bang-pow gets going, I was pleasantly surprised with how relentless the initial assault on the compound was. It feels exactly as it should - like an assault. If you give the gunfights enough time, they do begin to shed momentum, tending to drag without giving us enough variation to keep them interesting. Shoot this guy. Move. Shoot that guy. Move again. I felt a bit like I was watching the same mini-movie over and over again at points, but overall, I found myself satisfied with the movie's portrayal of a battle, even if it might not outrun some of Bay's more self-indulgent tendencies.

Given the repetitiveness of some of this movie's action scenes, it may not surprise you that 13 Hours is at its best when it actually is legitimately trying to do something new. One sequence features our contractors donning night vision goggles. They spy unidentified people moving through the tall grass towards the embassy. They're pretty sure that these people are insurgents, but they know what happens to them if they're wrong. The build-up in this particular sequence is excellently staged, most definitely the setpiece highlight of the movie, and I found myself wishing that the movie had included more variety in its action. But when everything was said and done, the sense of relief and release when the battle finally ended was palpable. I didn't realize how invested I got in the survival of the men on the roof of the embassy until the shooting was over. A lot of the filmmaking methods of 13 Hours are crude, but the results are undeniably effective, hitting like a drone-delivered 500-pound bomb to the chest in the end. The bomb may not be a very complex one, but it is still a bomb nonetheless, and it packs a punch.

I must say that even though 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a very flawed movie, it is still leagues better than Bay's Transformers movies, and a lot of the 1-star reviews are from reviewers upset over the politics of the movie, which are admittedly understated, though obviously pretty distant from the left. Personally, politics didn't come to my mind while I was watching the movie, and so what I was left with was a perfectly alright war movie that affected me more than I expected it to, delivering mostly solid action sequences with some questionable camerawork that nonetheless had its moments. This movie is pretty unrelenting if nothing else, and in a lot of ways, it made me feel like I was there in the beleaguered compound under the Libyan night sky.

And that's enough.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi - 6/10

Deuteronomy 20:1-4