Patriots Day (2016) reviews - movie

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Tragedy strikes on April 15, 2013, when two bombs explode during the Boston Marathon. In the aftermath of the attack, police Sgt. Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg), FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman) join courageous survivors, first responders and other investigators in a race against the clock to hunt down the suspects and bring them to justice.

Patriots Day, the new docudrama about the Boston Marathon bombing from director Peter Berg, traffics in one of the most pernicious and difficult to dispel misconceptions of the city: that there is a Wahlberg on every corner. Mark Wahlberg plays Tommy Saunders, a sergeant in the Boston Police Department. Unlike the other figures in the film—from Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman) to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (Michael Beach)—Saunders is a fictional character, a composite. The appeal of such a character is clear: It allows the filmmakers to ground the story of the bombing and its aftermath in the experiences of one man.
 result, however, is unintentional comedy underlying scenes of real tragedy. Here is Wahlberg at the race finish line, rushing to the aid of bloodied victims. Here is Wahlberg at the investigation command center, apparently the only Boston police officer familiar enough with Boylston Street to re-create the crime scene. Here is Wahlberg, taking a statement from the young man the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked in the waning hours of their flight. Here is Wahlberg in Watertown, exchanging fire with the brothers during their last stand. Here is Wahlberg discovering Dzhokhar’s hiding place in a winterized boat. Here is Wahlberg at Fenway Park, shaking hands with David Ortiz before the slugger takes the field to rally Hub fans’ shaken spirits.

This is our fucking city,” Ortiz famously said that afternoon, but in Patriots Day it’s Mark Wahlberg’s city—both in the sense that he’s everywhere and in the sense that this is a film content with the charming, if chuckleheaded, cartoon of the Boston local that Wahlberg has regularly inhabited throughout his career. A film, in other words, in which not one but two characters demonstrate their devotion to a romantic interest by picking them up something from a local coffeehouse called Dunkin’ Donuts.

It’s not necessarily a strike against the movie that it’s more Boston Strong than Boston Subtle. If you want a nuanced portrait of the area, you can drive up Route 1, jump on 128 just past Herb Chambers Cadillac, and take the exit for Manchester by the Sea. But Berg’s treatment of the attack, and the ensuing hunt for its perpetrators, is hardly more sophisticated than its sense of place. The movie’s re-enactment of the events of April 2013 is at times skillful, but it never offers an idea—about terror or a city’s resilience—to overcome the queasy feeling that an attack that left scores wounded and several dead is being replayed purely as entertainment: a morning of horror transformed, in four short years, into a night at the movies.

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Deepwater Horizon (2016) reviews - movie

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On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, igniting a massive fireball that kills several crew members. Chief electronics technician Mike Williams (Mark Wahlberg) and his colleagues find themselves fighting for survival as the heat and the flames become stifling and overwhelming. Banding together, the co-workers must use their wits to make it out alive amid all the chaos.

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'Deepwater Horizon' Honors The Sacrifice Without Sacrificing The Action

Mark Wahlberg in the terse, tight Deepwater Horizon.



One of the nation's biggest environmental disasters is now the season's big disaster flick. Sound insensitive? Well, rest assured the filmmakers were aware of — and have managed to sidestep — any qualms audience members are likely to have. Deepwater Horizon tells the story of the oil drilling rig that turned into an inferno in 2010 off the coast of Louisiana — a story of tragic, entirely avoidable missteps and astonishing personal heroics. Engineer Mike Williams is our entry point to the story. Played by Mark Wahlberg, he's sort of a Mr. Fixit on the oil rig Deepwater Horizon. He knows how everything works. We in the audience, though, need to be brought up to speed, so the film starts with a nifty demonstration on his kitchen table. His daughter is working on a school report and Mike offers to run props for her. Explaining that pulling up oil from hidden depths makes her dad something of a "dinosaur tamer," she reads, "oil is a monster, like the mean old dinosaurs all that oil used to be. For 300 million years they've been squeezed tighter and tighter, until Dad and his friends put a hole in their roof."

Mike grabs a soda can, and punctures it with a metal thingy.

"Freedom, so they rush to the new hole, and they run into this stuff called mud."

As she's talking, she pours honey down the straw, and darned if the honey doesn't block the soda, just like it's supposed to.

Mom and Dad are proud.

"Stay 10 forever please," Mike says as they walk away from the kitchen table. But before they get three steps, the honey gives way and there's soda on the ceiling.

Time to head to that oil rig — Deepwater Horizon — by helicopter, because it's 50 miles offshore. Mike and the relief crew, which includes rig driver Gina Rodriguez and safety guy Kurt Russell, are surprised on arrival that some safety tests are being skipped. Mud gets poured and it starts to act alarmingly like the honey in the kitchen.

Deepwater Horizon is technically impressive, but it can also be humanly intimate.

Russell keeps ordering more tests; BP oil exec John Malkovich — who is "oily" — keeps talking about how far behind schedule they are ... and the rest, as they say, is history.

Director Peter Berg spends the first part of the film finding intimate omens for the disaster to come — the splashed ceiling, the car that won't start at a crucial moment — then delivers catastrophe on an almost biblical scale: glass shattering as it is hit by gale force sludge; dying, oil-soaked pelicans falling from the heavens; flames leaping skyward from a drilling rig turned floating volcano.

The technical work is impressive enough that it's almost miraculous that the focus stays on the human beings at the inferno's center. Real people, 11 of whom died in what is arguably the globe-scarring ecological disaster of our time.

So you can't help marveling at the tightrope the filmmakers walk: honoring their courage and sacrifice while making an action flick entertaining enough to justify the more than $100 million it took to make it come alive on-screen. And come alive, Deepwater Horizon does, in 107 minutes of terse, tight storytelling, a good 95 of which are white-knuckle tense.

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