Show a little respect
Too soon. Too insensitive. Too sensational for those still grieving for the victims of the Boston bombings. Not a bad film, but why?
Not quite four years ago, two brothers – living in America but of Chechen extraction and radicalised Islamist beliefs – packed pressure cookers with explosives, nails, razor blades and ball-bearings, loaded them into rucksacks, and then casually left the bags among the packed crowds gathered close to the finish of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Having retired to a safe distance, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated their devices by remote control – killing three people instantly and causing horrendous injuries among many others.
Patriots Day is a dramatisation of this story and do you know what? About halfway through I realised I didn’t want to be watching it. Technically, there’s nothing much wrong – there are decent performances, the post-bombing mayhem is convincingly recreated, and there’s no doubt that tension and excitement levels do rise in the final third. But somehow, it felt exploitative in a way that other recreations of terrorist events, such as Paul Greengrass’s United 93 or Oliver Stone’s
World Trade Center, managed to avoid, albeit narrowly in the latter case.
So what’s the difference here? It’s partly the undue haste with which this project has reached the screen – they started making this less than three years after the event – but more important is its lack of ambition. With their films, Greengrass and Stone were at least trying to make sense of events that had changed the world. But the Boston Marathon bombing changed little or nothing, except, of course, for those who were killed – who included an eight year-old boy – or left with life-changing injuries, and their families and friends.
As a result, with the film unfolding in its alltoo-familiar multi-stranded way, we are left with the growing impression that a real-life tragedy has been cynically turned into a conventional commercial thriller. There’s music to ratchet up the tension, Hollywood casting to ensure everyone is better looking than they would have been in real life, and, towards the end, even an extraordinary and highly explosive shoot-out.
Compounding my sense of mounting disappointment is the fact that Patriots Day – the title is taken from an April state public holiday that marks the anniversary of two Civil War battles and on which the marathon is run – is directed by Peter Berg and stars Mark Wahlberg, a partnership that has resulted in the splendid Deepwater Horizon and even better Lone Survivor but here delivers nothing very notable at all. Wahlberg plays Detective Tommy Saunders, a feisty Boston cop who, as marathon day dawns, has just one more shift back in uniform following a disciplinary matter. But his superiors know he’s a good, reliable man and when he gets to the course, he’s put in charge of the finish line. By now, other stories are up and running and, of course, at this stage, we don’t know who lives and who dies. Will it be the young couple just starting out in married life? The shy campus police officer who has just got himself a date? Or maybe the soon-to-retire police officer who really ought to be trying harder to give up smoking? And then there are the Tsarnaev brothers, cooped up in the flat that the elder brother,
‘A work of non-fiction being turned, not into a dramatised documentary, but into out-and-out entertainment’
Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze), shares with his hijab-wearing American wife and, temporarily, with Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff ), who has moved out of college accommodation to the baffled bemusement of his dope-smoking dormies. The brothers alternate eating bowls of breakfast cereal with watching bomb-making videos on the internet.
The film takes its lead from Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph Over Tragedy, a book written by two of the city’s senior journalists, and part of the problem I was having, I suspect, stems from a work of non-fiction being turned, not into a dramatised documentary but into out-andout entertainment.
Real people died as a result of the attack and it’s noteworthy that Berg’s cameras focus on only one of them. Out of respect? Maybe. Or maybe as quiet acknowledgment that the makers knew they were treading on difficult ground all along.
Others, I’m sure, won’t be as sensitive. But to me, this feels like a very American response to a very violent manifestation of the ‘enemy within’. It’s a response that fails to acknowledge that the modern terrorist doesn’t mind being captured or killed as a result of their action or that the police and other security agencies ‘getting their man’ isn’t really the end of the story. But, as I say, maybe that’s just me.