VERDICTBerg captures the horror of the 2013
BostonMarathon bombing, and thebreathless
manhunt that followed, in a gripping, if largely
nuance-free, thrill ride.class Americans wearing some kind of uniform.
The letter of the law gets short shrift here —
following the gut instincts of beat cops is more
important. While some of the casting is
remarkable, for both talent and verisimilitude,
Mark Wahlberg’s character isn’t based on a real
cop, but rather an amalgam of several Boston
cops. It’s not a bad decision – it helps provide
one consistent presence for the entireilm,
which could otherwise feel a tad episodic as it
moves through the different phases of the
investigation. But it’s worth remembering
that this is a ictionalised account of those
four or ive days.
Patriots Dayis really a police procedural
— there’s some screentime devoted to the
victims, but mostly this is about the manhunt.
Which means juggling multiple strands, so Berg
relies on some heavyweight actors who can
make their scenes feel bigger than they are. John
Goodman sports a startling pair of eyebrows as
Boston police commissioner Ed Davis; Kevin
Bacon manages both laser focus and frazzled
frustration as FBI Special Agent Richard
DesLauriers, who has the thankless task of
coordinating the investigation; JK Simmons
is a suburban police sergeant who inds
himself unexpectedly drawn into the
mounting manhunt.
The other major strand is, of course, the
killers. And here you have two actors absolutely
killing it (as it were) in very unsympathetic
roles. Themo Melikidze as alpha-dog brother
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Alex Wolff as the more
Americanised younger brother Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, are both sensational. They radiate
genuine instability and danger without sliding
into easy caricature, and they hint at
complexities that the script doesn’t even attempt
to grapple with. There’s no moral ambiguityhere: the Tsarnaevs are bad guys who did, after
all, brutally kill and maim; but as characters,
they aren’t cardboard cutouts, either.
There’s always a danger with this sort of
ilm — especially coming only a few years after
the event — that it can veer towards being
exploitative; Berg avoids that trap by wearing
his heart on his sleeve at all times, and closes
with interviews with some of the real people
portrayed in the ilm — a not-so-subtle way of
announcing you have the imprimatur of the
survivors. (And for Red Sox fans, a cameo from
David “Big Papi” Ortiz — a sureire way to get
the people of Boston onside.)
TIM KEENLeft:Mark Walhberg as
Boston PD officer
Tommy Saunders.
Above:Commissioner
Ed Davis (John
Goodman), FBI Special
Agent Richard
DesLauriers (Kevin
Bacon) and Governor
Deval Patrick
(Michael Beach).
Left:Saunders
and wife Carol
(Michelle Monaghan.)