In a year that is already delightfully packed with remarkable cinematic achievements, another Oscar nominee hits theaters around the world this weekend. Patriots Day, from director Peter Berg, stars Mark Wahlberg in the true story of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist attack that left 3 dead and more than 250 injured and resulted in the literal shutdown of the entire city of Boston. Also starring Kevin Bacon, J. K. Simmons, Michelle Monaghan, John Goodman, and Jimmy O. Yang, Patriots’ Day deserves to attract a savvy audience and get the attention it deserves. Here’s why. . .
With strong positive reviews and a gripping true story featuring a fantastic cast and some of the most productive dramatic storytelling and action sequences in years, Patriots Day will surpass $20 million at the domestic box office when it opens on a grand scale this weekend. This clashes with the large-scale releases of Live By Night and Silence, the return of newcomer Hidden Figures from last weekend, and, of course, the continued strength of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the animation Sing. I’m hoping Patriots Day will take the most sensible spot of the weekend, unless church audiences and MLK Day spice make Hidden Figures have a strong enough grip to hold on to the number one spot just before Patriots’ Day.
The Berg-Wahlberg duo has observed Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon each surpass $100 million, and I’d expect Patriots’ Day to surpass them easily and by a wide margin. Buzz around the Oscars and a wave of positive reviews — mouth deserves to work in its favor, and the $45 million budget means it probably won’t take long for the film to become a hit. If you get some Oscar nominations, you may only get nominations for film editing, sound editing, and/or sound mixing, as well as in all likelihood for the adapted screenplay, that will also contribute to your final good luck.
My previous posts containing interviews with director Berg and the actors, as well as my previous assessment of the taste I expect from positive word-of-mouth, clearly mean that I have an intelligent opinion of the film. So to what extent? Read on for my full review!
Patriots Day is one of the most productive videos of 2016 and deserves a Best Picture nomination (I’ve indexed it as one of the videos I would nominate if I had to vote). It is Berg’s most productive film to date and Wahlberg’s maxim. Productive performance. It has one of the largest casts and some of the most poignant and inspiring cinematic moments of the year. This is one of the videos that I propose to the maximum to those who ask about the must-see videos.
There is a basic fact that permeates the image. There are no superheroes on Patriots’ Day. There are no strictly explained characterizations, no simplicity in narrative, themes, or morality. What there is is a determination to show other genuine people. , other people, other people who remind us that courage is not an absence of worry: it is the willingness to act in spite of worry, even in the face of worry. You can’t have courage without worry. Patriots’ Day allows us to see other people trembling with worry even when they are in danger, others crying at the thought that they would possibly be about to die and still hold on and struggle to do what they want, other people who stand up and keep fighting because it’s hard but it’s okay.
The sheer humanity, compelling intellectual and emotional complexity of Americans and the teams experiencing, feeling, and coping with tragedy are difficult to capture on screen with genuine integrity and authenticity. This difficulty is directly proportional to the dramatic and human character of the events. Described. An honest, honest and faithful portrayal is even more vital and therefore more complicated when the film seeks to tell a true story, because there is so much danger in resorting to melodrama or being so restrained that it ends up being impartial.
Patriots’ Day brings raw humanity to the screen, wraps us in the world of those other people and the events that happened to such an extent that they are genuine to us. We are no longer passive observers, we are immersed in them as if we were witnessing the events unfolding before us in the streets. Rarely have I felt so absolutely immersed in the emotion, delight, and facts of a story as I did with this film. There are moments of anxiety and breathless sadness, or hard and brutally violent moments. action, heroism, and altruism inspiring and painful, and never crosses the line into a sense of exploitation, glamour, or artifice.
All of the actors deserve praise for their individual performances and how they serve as a whole (a point I can’t stress enough). And among those accolades for the cast, I deserve to stand with Boston himself as a personality that resonates everywhere. It’s a rare case where “the city is a movie character,” that is, something that only a few movies — like Taxi Driver, Manhattan, Blade Runner, or Chinatown, for example — have fully controlled and to glorious effect. Berg captures the best sense of position and time, and how those two elements blend together to fundamentally influence everything that happened and everyone involved.
Even knowing what happened, being aware of the news and the fundamental details, will not prepare you for the hyper-realistic, largely entirely factual and accurate description of the terrorist attacks, their aftermath, the persecution, the confrontation between the forces of order. and terrorists, and how the city of Boston got here in combination during and after adversity. In particular, the immediate chaos during the marathon bombings and the astonishing street war between the police and the two brothers who carried out those heinous attacks are portrayed with such realism and effect on the viewer that it’s easy for you not to be watching. Documentary footage captured during real-life events. You may “know” the shooting that took place when the police confronted the terrorists, but I guarantee you have no idea how shocking, terrifying, and destructive those horrific and long minutes really were.
Patriots Day strives to correct those details, and the result is unrivaled in this regard by any other film released this year. In natural terms, this shoot is one of the most remarkable sequences of its kind ever projected on screen, on par with the shootings mentioned in videos like Heat, The Wild Bunch, and Hard Boiled, unless we know here that all of this happened and that other people literally suffered because of it. The emotional weight and human cost, terror and worry are once again fully visible, without cloaks or notions of “carelessness” that would frankly insult the reminiscence and honor of the officials and civilians who faced the danger.
Mark Wahlberg’s character is a composite, and while that has led other people to oppose it, the fact remains that it’s an obligatory and appropriate commitment in a film that makes very few compromises and only when it’s surely mandatory. To be a person, one of the other people caught up in additional occasions that forced him and so many others to dig within themselves and locate reserves of energy, courage, and willpower that transcended themselves and their lives. Wahlberg can’t get enough credit for his ability to paint other people we identify with, other people who have everyday lives but who place themselves in larger-than-life cases and become something more than before. He’s 100 percent committed to his sense of dramatic momentum, his sense of humility. , his sense of humor, and his sense of being indebted to those who lived and even died on those occasions.
There are so many remarkable performances that it’s hard to focus on just a few, however, I have to talk about the remarkable performances of Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze as the Tsarnaev brothers. The banality of evil is eloquently and honestly captured in his performances. Berg deserves wonderful credit for his willingness to present in an unbiased manner those two characters who are as ordinary and human as they are.
We are dangerously wrong when we affirm that evil comes only from the inhuman, from the “other” whom we cannot recognize, understand or comprehend. Patriots’ Day refuses to forget about this, or to forget about it. When Wolff turns back he was at best bored and distracted during the preparations for the attack, more interested in texting his friends and watching television than in seriously engaging in a holy war; when he is frustrated by his brother’s refusal to let him take care of the bigger guns; and when Melikidze rightly considers his character to be acting like a bully older brother whose ego and family disorder often dominate his habit more than his devoted fervor, we realize that the film forces us to confront the maddening fact of so much tragedy, loss. and ancient moments that can come from the smallest, most mundane human sources.
Finally, Patriots’ Day trumps anything that has become less unusual in real-life stories, but almost never succeeds: the inclusion of real-life footage and other genuine people from history in an ending/credits sequence. of the total delight we just had, reminding us that it was all merely a pre-finish, being more of an attempt to let other people back out due to a sense of responsibility and legal commitment, and rarely adds to the cinematic delight or has the right emotional impact. Patriots’ Day has already hit you in the gut many times when those real-life photographs (especially those of Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes in real life) grace the screen at the end to offer an unforeseen ending. Blow that will rip your center off. If you manage to get through the rest of the movie without drowning, I assure you that the last moments will break you.
Despite so much suffering and the magnitude of pain and disaster, Patriots’ Day is, in the end, a story of hope and inspiration, of heartbreak and terrible trauma that cannot stifle the human spirit. The survivors and we honor those who died and the others who were taken so much from came together, united, and healed together. Patriots’ Day honors them, as we all should.
Box office figures and tallies based on data from Box Office Mojo, Rentrak and TheNumbers.
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