13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Michael Bay is a commercial filmmaker with a great grasp of basic genre scales and practices, but he cannot naturalise all the events, including the action sequences, and give them a fatal, physically painful feel. 13 Hours is a prototype of a good action flick, but it desperately lacks any innovative impulse that would elevate it to the category of excellent – the protagonist is presented using the most profane clichés and his only motivation is traditionally to return to his wife and small daughters, while the other players in the story are nothing but passer-bys, hard to tell from one another thanks to identical physical parameters in the action turmoil. The basic plot is plumped up by the annoying figure of the irrational boss, who only acts expediently to further escalate the situation, and finally the action itself doesn't make you completely surrender to it and forget everything else. We can praise the fast pace, thanks to which the runtime doesn't feel excessive, and the opening documentary passage and the related depiction of Benghazi as a real hell on earth, where killing is the order of the day. It's a more sincere and effective film than the disparate Pearl Harbor, but still too contrived and lacking in intensity, a stale looser compared to Black Hawk Down. 60% (30/05/2016)

Michael Bay is searching and doesn't know which way to go. He may be aging and maturing in certain creative aspects, but at the same time he is dramatically losing his directorial touch and there is almost nothing left of what entertained his millions of fans and die-hard worshippers in the 90s and 00s. Nowadays they're more or less experiments meant to evoke some sort of shift in the viewer's perception, but I want the old Armageddon and 14 cuts per second back, not a half digital copy of Black Hawk Down where the dying and marine feeling is similarly raw but formally lost before our eyes. The viewer is eventually hit by explosions and bullets, but not entirely in a positive way. It's not as it should be. (05/02/2016)

Michael Bay is making a comeback and after all the trailers in early February, he's serving up the first major surprise of the year, although I'm not concerned about how much hate the film will get and for what. It's impossible not to expect Black Hawk Down version 2.0, but the fact that the viewer actually gets exactly that in the end is actually a good thing. The difference is that while Scott has elevated warfare to cinematic art, Bay serves it up in his own way, within the subgenre of his own creative ego. Take it or leave it. 15 years have passed quickly and the audience's perception has fundamentally changed, so if you grew up on "Call of Duty" (and other wannabe clones), you can’t help but be intrigued. Bay takes the path of least resistance and quite sympathetically lines up the flesh-and-blood protagonists, going after all the clichés and cheesy scenes so hard that you don't actually get angry at him - because only he can do them that way. He lets the paranoia of a broken state, where a foreigner can't be sure of anything, pour off the screen in full throttle and then unleashes a full-blooded barrage of war that lasts, with few breaks, until the end, when the survivors are in tears and so are you. In fact, the action is something so impressive, at once absorbing in the opacity of the camera and the editing, that one is left wondering why it doesn't bother us this time. It's wartime carnage without the slightest overlap, but also without cinematic compromise. In the week of the presidential primary, Republicans couldn't have asked for anything better to be in movie theaters. PS: I understand that Michael has to give the heads at Universal something to do, but couldn't they negotiate a deal of five personal action films for every Transformers? (03/02/2016)

Considering that this is Michael Bay, it's actually quite good. I don't trust him, but it's clear that he is genuinely interested in war and war films, so he knows how to make them. At the end, there are once again emotions that he doesn't know how to capture, but the choice of actors who are not that well-known was a good decision and gives the film a good look. (26/05/2016)

The solid action scenes aren’t enough to save the flat story. In an effort to be serious, Bay becomes less entertaining. We’ve seen bands of tough guys pitted against ragheads a billion times. Of course, the bloody finale is fine, but I wanted more catchphrases and some crazy sadistic son of a bitch to spice up the boredom a little. I understand that based on real events means less of everything and more harsh reality, but then it would require a more interesting historical milestone than this. Next time they should try Greengrass or to film it from the Jihadis’ point of view, where the goons from the CIA would play the bad guys. (08/07/2016)