Marathon race against time
REVIEW: Patriots Day compellingly follows those who brought bombers to justice
Patriots Day is a crime film. Not, as grammarians might suspect, the tale of an apostrophe heist, although I’d like to see that. This is the story of the Boston Marathon bombing that took place on Patriots’ Day, April 15, 2013, and the roughly 100 hours that elapsed between the attack and the capture of the two bombers.
It’s also the story of people doing what they do best. This is the third collaboration between Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, after Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon. It’s the third based-ona-true-story screenplay for two of the writers, Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy, who worked on The Finest Hours and The Fighter (also with Wahlberg). It’s Kevin Bacon’s second film in a row playing an FBI agent. And I’ve lost track of how many times his Boston-born co-star has portrayed a soulful, blue-collar salt of the earth.
Berg, who also co-wrote the screenplay, brings the whole enterprise together with remarkable efficiency and just enough wit to remain respectful. (Inter-departmental squabbling is always good for a chuckle, like the Boston cop who refuses to leave her sharpshooter’s perch when the FBI guns show up. “Glad to have you with us, ma’am,” one tells her wearily.)
The first 25 minutes introduce us to the players, including Wahlberg’s Sgt. Tommy Saunders, a composite character who presumably combines the good looks of several actual cops; John Goodman as the police commissioner; J.K. Simmons as Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese from nearby Watertown; James Colby as Superintendent Evans; Michelle Monaghan, who deserves better than a walk-on as Mrs. Saunders; and a handful of soon-to-be-victims.
We also get Themo Melikidze and Alex Wolff as the bomber brothers, one of them a serious, self-guided jihadist, the other a doofus who would count as comic relief if the subject weren’t so serious. And, after the explosions near the marathon’s finish line, which killed three people and injured 170, in strides Bacon as Special Agent Richard DesLauriers, whose skills include being able to turn an empty warehouse into a bustling command centre in just a few hours.
The film surges forward with a satisfyingly staccato, police-procedural rhythm. We watch one investigator scrolling back and forth through some video surveillance footage, getting more and more interested. But what does he see? Finally, he calls Bacon over and points to the suspect who became known as White Hat. The man’s tell is that, when the bomb goes off, “he’s the only one that looks away.”
A little later, Wahlberg’s cop, who’s been running on a diet of Tylenol, the odd slug of booze and a sense of justice, is telling the FBI which stores’ cameras to check, as they trace White Hat’s path.
The film’s climax is a whiz-bang shoot-’em-up, with Boston cops cursing and shooting wildly at the cornered suspects, who respond by lobbing their homemade pipe bombs at their attackers. But while Berg clearly knows how to choreograph a gun battle — see Lone Survivor and, if you must, Battleship — he also displays a deft hand at keeping all the narrative balls in the air. These include comedian Jimmy O. Yang as a Chinese immigrant carjacked by the terrorists; one bomber’s maybe-complicit wife; and a host of other tertiary figures who nonetheless get enough screen time and dialogue to register as more than extras.
It’s a compelling mix of historical re-creation and narrative flare, no more so than when Bacon’s character arrives at the site of the first explosion and is reluctant to declare it an act of terrorism. The cops say he’ll be accused of not moving fast enough. “The accusations are going to come no matter what we do,” he replies. Then he spots a shard of something in the debris. It’s enough for him. “It’s terrorism; we’ll take it.”