Patriots Day misses the point

Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan in Patriots Day. Image courtesy CBS Films.

There is the old saw about how art is meant to stir strong emotional reactions in the people absorbing it; good art, in essence, leaves a person feeling something different than before. Strong emotional responses aren’t always a sign of quality though, as is the case with the wretched Boston Marathon bombing film Patriots Day.

It isn’t necessarily too soon for a film about the bombings and the ensuing days of surreal discomfort; three years is enough time to consider the implications and find insight for what happened. I actually signed up to serve as an extra for it along with hundreds of other locals (I was not selected to be in it) because of the potential such a film could have: The events surrounding the bombings had enough intrigue and action to make for a rather good film like United 93 if done with the same level of sensitivity and filmmaking competence. And director Peter Berg, who is listed as one of three writers on this film, has shown himself to be a generally OK action director; even the otherwise not good Deepwater Horizon sports some pretty solid action sequences. That trait carries over at least a little to Patriots Day, which stages the bombings in an effective and riveting fashion, coming out of nowhere in a sense befitting the actual event.

If the rest of Patriots Day had followed that track this film would at least be interesting. Things though go awry completely shortly after the bombs go off and the bodies of the victims are shown, limbs and shoes strewn across Boylston Street in an unnecessarily blunt fashion. The lowlight of the sequence comes with the presence of a dead child, his body covered by a white sheet. That body represents the real-life victim, an 8-year-old boy and one of three victims from the bombing itself. Berg and his writers can't help but have other characters repeatedly point at the body on the ground, using the death of a child as a prop and showing little actual regard for the child's existence. It's a grotesque display of filmmaking and tastelessness by Berg.

Not that Patriots Day had its priorities set heading to that point. Things open poorly enough when Mark Wahlberg's loose cannon of a cop breaks down a door to arrest some guy unrelated to the bombings itself. The film opts to track the lives of people affected by the bombings from the night before throughout, most of whom are real people played by rather famous actors. To be fair, the cast is a pretty solid, if extremely underutilized, collection of character actors, including John Goodman, Michael Beach, J. K. Simmons, Kevin Bacon, Khandi Alexander, Michelle Monaghan and others. The film even finds time to try to tell the story of the bombers themselves, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (played by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze, respectively). It's a lot for one film to process, meaning Berg and his writers don't have an adequate amount of time to understand the personalities and beats of each character, especially the disappointingly unexamined Tsarnaevs.

The one character who the audience does get to know is Wahlberg's sergeant Tommy Saunders, who is fittingly a composite character mixed in with the real people. Saunders is a frustrating character, his apparent alcoholism shown and immediately abandoned despite the pressure of the situation he's involved with, which would realistically result in more drinking. That his figure is vital to the investigation is rather offensive to the real cops and citizens who actually did his character’s work. Considering how many real-life figures are depicted as heroes, using Saunders to cover others up is a little ridiculous. That Saunders just appears everywhere is perplexing, including areas of outside of Boston proper that are not within his jurisdiction. He's a redundant character in a film with far too many figures already.

Patriots Day can’t decide what it wants to be. Attempts at a realistic overview of the bombings are scuttled by the intrusion of Wahlberg’s Saunders. A fictionalized outlook of the moments from the day before through David Ortiz’s famous speech at Fenway is cut short by the attempts at verisimilitude. A bit at the end with interviews of victims and a few notable officials is off putting and adds nothing to the film itself besides wondering why Berg and Wahlberg couldn’t just finance a good documentary instead of producing a clunky, disgraceful flick.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 133 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Theoretically people in Boston, but it’ll more than likely tick many of them off.

Take the whole family?: The film shows the bombs going off and a pretty brutal shootout, so stick right around the rating level.

Theater or Netflix?: Skip it.

What else is bad about this film?: Aside from probable slander against Katherine Russell (Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife), the film plays fairly loose with the legality of the decisions made to find the Tsarnaevs. There are certain bits acknowledged by the filmmakers, but they never show any interest in considering the ramifications of the search and the interrogation of Russell. The ends seem to justify the means with this film, which is not overly surprising given how stupid this film is but still serves as another reason for frustration and ire.

Watch this instead?: Doing films based on real life tragedies is difficult but still doable. One of the better options is the subtly complicated Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan. Also worth a watch are Gus Van Sant's Elephant and David Fincher's Zodiac.