Patriots Day (February 2017)

Official Australian release date: 2/2/17. Viewed: 4/2/17.

Director: Peter Berg

Actors: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, Alex Wolff

Genre: Drama / Action

Rating: M

‘Patriots Day’ is another “based-on-real-events” film by Berg, after ‘Lone Survivor’ and ‘Deepwater Horizon’ – and this is just as good. I think once he got ‘Battleship’ out of his system, he’s only got good directing left! He takes his time introducing a set of ~10 characters in the first 20min (no titles), in the lead up to and the start of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Tommy (Wahlberg) is the everyman cop, Carol (Monaghan) is his wife, Ed (Goodman) is the police commissioner, DesLauriers (Bacon) is the FBI agent, Tamerlan (Melikidze) and Dzhokhar (Wolff) are the bombers, and there’s a few other ‘regular’ couples introduced, so we get coverage of the incident from various angles.

Once the bombs go off, it’s utter chaos and is shown very realistically – heart-wrenchingly so – with plenty of smoke, blood, sirens and people screaming everywhere. Tommy does the best he can, but it’s good to see him exhausted and overwhelmed once he’s back home with Carol. We see firsthand some of the victims in hospital – plenty of amputations. Then, it turns to police/FBI efficiency, with a “hours since bombing” graphic letting us know the timeline, as they try to catch the suspects. This man-hunt aspect of the film keeps the momentum up.

Some of the characters we’ve been following that seem to have no role are suddenly involved (i.e. Sergeant Pugliese [Simmons] and Meng [Yang]) as the man-hunt escalates into a shootout. I’m not entirely sure of the actual events that happened after the marathon bombing, so I’m not sure how much creative license was taken by Berg, but there’s a satisfactory conclusion. The film wraps up with the real-life people of the characters we’ve been watching speaking on the impact it’s had on their lives. There’s some truly emotional and touching moments throughout the film, and while it’s sometimes too overtly patriotic, it shows the impact on real people and their resilience.

Overall: Well-made and touching true story.

Gav's Rating: 4 stars.