BLOOD AND FLAG-WAVING

Adozen desperate men on a daring mission against impossible odds sounds like a great fictional yarn. But 12 Strong, based on the book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, is a true story, which complicates its trajectory. It’s OK to put Chris Hemsworth on a stallion and ride him through dust and smoke like a one-man cavalry for the sake of entertainment — one could even argue it’s not done enough. But in the service of a biopic, it tilts dangerously close to jingoism.

Hemsworth stars as Captain Mitch Nelson, leader of a team of Special Forces that had been disbanded just before 9/11, and hastily reassembled to ship off to Afghanistan barely a month later. Mitch has no combat experience but is, for reasons never explored, trusted and respected by his battletested men, who include Hal Spencer (Michael Shannon) and Sam Diller (Michael Pena).

Through a combination of bluster, machismo and raw intelligence, Mitch talks his way into leading a 12-man strike force into Mazar-iSharif, a Taliban stronghold whose toppling could shift the balance of power in the country. After a harrying ride in an unpressurized helicopter at 25,000 feet, the boys are deposited in northern Afghanistan.

They soon meet up with local warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum (Homeland’s Navid Negahban), who’s been fighting one enemy or another since the Soviet invasion 20 years earlier. He distrusts the untested Mitch, declaring he lacks “killer eyes,” and informing him the Taliban will fight to the death, in the belief of a reward in heaven. Mitch responds that if Dostum will help him, he’ll give the Taliban all the rewards they want.

With a screenplay adapted by Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) and Peter Craig (Mockingjay), 12 Strong finds some gruff humour in the interplay between the American soldiers and their Afghan hosts. One man (Trevante Rhodes) picks up a “shadow” in an admiring young freedom fighter, a relationship you fear will end badly given the number of bullets zinging around.

But aside from Mitch, Hal and Dostum, character development is kept to a minimum. The warlord is a fascinating character — at one point he holds up an airstrike while he checks that his nephew has defected from the Taliban, something that’s apparently happened more than once — but we never get to know his followers as anything other than extras/cannon fodder.

And while Danish photographer and first-time director Nicolai Fuglsig works hard to keep the audience grounded in time and space — onscreen titles remind us how long the troops have been in country, and everyone is forever pulling out maps — the battle scenes sometimes dissolve into quick, chaotic cuts featuring a lot of dark-skinned people getting mowed down.

Granted, the fighting is visceral; can’t remember the last time I winced so many times in a single film at the violence. And the Taliban, in case we forgot, are real bad apples, as shown in a scene in which one of their leaders executes a schoolteacher whose female students’ knowledge of math and spelling is too strong for his liking.

So 12 Strong is not a movie for those squeamish about blood or flag-waving. But perhaps, given recent posttraumatic tales (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Thank You For Your Service, Last Flag Flying), America needs a bit of pick-me-up bellicosity. At the least, this one will remind the nation that it was plotters in Afghanistan and not Iraq who targeted the World Trade Center. ∂∂∂1/2

DAVID JAMES Geoff Stults as Sean Coffers and Chris Hemsworth as Captain Mitch Nelson in Danish photographer and first-time director Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong, which deals with the first U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan after 9/11.