(From left) Pablo Schreiber, John Krasinski, David Denman, and Dominic Fumusa in Michael Bay’s ‘13 Hours’ (Photo: Christian Black/Paramount Pictures via AP)
The vast and underserved heartland audience that made such a smash out of American Sniper a year ago finally has some fresh red meat to call its own in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Michael Bay’s latest in-between-Transformers picture actually features just as much action as his giant toy extravaganzas, being an account of the waves of intense firefights that occurred at the American compound in Libya’s second city on September 11-12, 2012. The big selling point of Mitchell Zuckoff’s book about the incident, which cost the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, was its revelation of the hitherto unknown role special ops played in holding marauding local radicals at bay until all American personnel could be evacuated.
But while this adaptation superficially goes out of its way to avoid being overtly political, its patriotic tenor is as unmistakable as its sentimentality. Even if an unmentioned Hillary Clinton has nothing specific to worry about in regard to the film’s content, its mere existence will stir up fresh talk about her behavior regarding the incident, and there’s no doubt that Donald Trump fans will eat this up more enthusiastically than anyone.
Although it was never presented as such in news accounts, the siege on the diplomatic enclave and the secret CIA facility a mile away resembles in its dramatization nothing so much as the battle of the Alamo, albeit with a better ending as far as the Americans were concerned. As with so many accounts of Western involvement in the Middle East and other regions — Black Hawk Down, for starters — this is the story of a fiasco, one made less so by the fierce and selfless commitment of a few good men whose old-fashioned kick-ass attitudes form the crux of the yarn’s appeal.
The vast and underserved heartland audience that made such a smash out of American Sniper a year ago finally has some fresh red meat to call its own in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Michael Bay’s latest in-between-Transformers picture actually features just as much action as his giant toy extravaganzas, being an account of the waves of intense firefights that occurred at the American compound in Libya’s second city on September 11-12, 2012. The big selling point of Mitchell Zuckoff’s book about the incident, which cost the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, was its revelation of the hitherto unknown role special ops played in holding marauding local radicals at bay until all American personnel could be evacuated.
But while this adaptation superficially goes out of its way to avoid being overtly political, its patriotic tenor is as unmistakable as its sentimentality. Even if an unmentioned Hillary Clinton has nothing specific to worry about in regard to the film’s content, its mere existence will stir up fresh talk about her behavior regarding the incident, and there’s no doubt that Donald Trump fans will eat this up more enthusiastically than anyone.
Although it was never presented as such in news accounts, the siege on the diplomatic enclave and the secret CIA facility a mile away resembles in its dramatization nothing so much as the battle of the Alamo, albeit with a better ending as far as the Americans were concerned. As with so many accounts of Western involvement in the Middle East and other regions — Black Hawk Down, for starters — this is the story of a fiasco, one made less so by the fierce and selfless commitment of a few good men whose old-fashioned kick-ass attitudes form the crux of the yarn’s appeal.
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