A tragedy tied up too neatly
Patriots Day 15 Cert, 130 min
Dir: Peter Berg; Starring: Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Alex Wolff, Themo Melikidze, Melissa Benoist, J.K. Simmons, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan.
The police procedural has been skulking around cinema’s edges since at least the early Thirties, when Fritz Lang’s M set the skills and expertise of Berlin’s law enforcement – and its underworld, too – against Peter Lorre’s shadow-slinking child killer. Take it as a sign of the times that the counterterrorism procedural – same slowburn tingles, but ignited by explosions – has become a viable genre offshoot.
The director Peter Berg is something of a pioneer in the area: his 2007 film The Kingdom was partly inspired by the bombing of the Khobar Towers residence at a US military base in Saudi Arabia 11 years previously. But his latest picture sits closer to the truth – at times uncomfortably so.
Patriots Day is a dramatisation of the Boston marathon bombings of April 2013, in which two brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, planted homemade explosives near the finish line and detonated them mid-race. It uses footage broadcast by news channels at the time and tells the stories of a number of civilians and public servants caught up in the attack.
The main character, played by Mark Wahlberg, is the only one who’s fictional. He’s a police detective called Tommy Saunders who keeps popping up wherever the action is. But the rest – John Goodman’s formidable police commissioner, Kevin Bacon’s tersely pragmatic FBI honcho and J K Simmons’s and Jake Picking’s convivial local beat cops included – are all real people whose experiences are more or less faithfully represented by Berg and his co-writers’ script. What’s more, they all show up in person in a documentary coda, with recollections of the day that you can’t listen to and be unmoved.
Lang’s film depicted the Weimar Republic as hopelessly ill-equipped to cope with the emergence of a made-up horror. Berg’s shows Boston galvanised by a real one. From the start, the city is depicted as a colourful, unpretentious place. Meanwhile, Wahlberg’s Saunders cheerfully talks back to his superiors – presumably the cause of a disciplinary action, which, like his standard-issue Anxious Wife (Michelle Monaghan), feels like a tokenistic attempt to round out his character.
If that’s Boston through and through, the Tsarnaevs are obvious outsiders. We meet them glowering in a drab apartment – Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) watches a bomb-making tutorial with a bowl of Cheerios on his knee, while 19-year-old Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff) lounges on the sofa in a hoodie.
The attack is vividly staged, though it doesn’t feel exploitative. Berg focuses on the response of the survivors and emergency services rather than the carnage. Errors and setbacks are acknowledged and dramatised with an honesty that feels bracing in such an outwardly flagwaving film.
Patriots Day starts with thrilling and chaotic source material, but untangles it almost to a fault. The story never really feels alive with danger, and you often find yourself waiting for pieces to slot into place. It is stirring, wellacted, moving and built with conviction and flair. But a film about such a senseless attack shouldn’t be scared, now and then, to make a little less sense.