Drama that shoots but doesn’t score
12 Strong 15 cert, 130 min
Dir Nicolai Fuglsig Starring Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Trevante Rhodes, Navid Negahban, William Fichtner, Elsa Pataky, Austin Stowell, Taylor Sheridan
The Danish photojournalist Nicolai Fuglsig’s debut feature,
12 Strong, could probably have been called Horse Soldiers, and maybe should have been. That was the title of Doug Stanton’s non-fiction book, about the first-wave response of US Special Forces and paramilitaries in kick-starting the war on terror. Immediately after 9/11, a dozen of these green beret types became Task Force Dagger, their mission to join forces with an Afghan general in the mountainside, and strike at the heart of the Taliban leadership.
Given the demands of their terrain, horseback was the only option, and in they rode, as played here by leading man Chris Hemsworth and a wellcurated supporting cast. Their base of operations is nicknamed the Alamo – an unconsoling moniker, as someone points out, given the obliteration of American troops at said stronghold. Playing at times like a virtual clone of the Magnificent Seven remake, the film is well aware of its genre precedents, and happy to style itself, with aggressive banter and touches of flag-waving, as a post-millennial update on the cavalry western.
A poor one, though. However many allowances you want to make for formula scripting in a US war drama, it’s very disappointing to see Ted Tally, an Oscar-winner for his magnificent The Silence of the Lambs screenplay, co-credited here. You could pretty much feed this saga through a machine and wind up with the same level of chatter and characterisation.
More seriously, the film has no desire to question the stakes of America’s counter-attack or consider anything beyond a might-is-right, tit-for-tat philosophy throughout. It’s phenomenally basic. Before being flung across the screen by B-52 bomb blasts, the Taliban troops are easily spotted as an indefinable mass of scowling extras, while Task Force Dagger’s Afghan allies crack jokes and are even partial to swigging vodka, so we know they’re not a lost cause. There’s a ruggedly compelling performance from Navid Negahban as their leader, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who later became the country’s vice president.
None of the film’s limitations would have mattered so much if it were a more viscerally powerful viewing experience, along the lines of Michael Bay’s abstractly scorching Benghazi epic 13 Hours. There are some memorable fly-by shots, and isolated images of destruction stick out, but the film’s pace is sluggish and faltering where it ought to be lean and mean.
Michael Shannon and Michael Peña, in stock roles, do the gruff thing we expect of them, but neither seem tested or especially rewarded by the relentless, suspenseless combat.