USA TODAY International Edition
' Patriots Day' captures Boston's heroism
The duo of director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg are becoming as all- American as hot dogs and Mom’s apple pie.
Their newest collaboration, the drama Patriots Day (*** out of four; rated R; now showing in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, expands nationwide Friday), is their best yet, effectively capturing the tragedy of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings while at the same time showcasing the fortitude of the human spirit sans any sense of rah- rah corniness.
The main narrative follows authority figures, ordinary citizens and even the terrorists themselves from the night before the violent April 15 attacks to the suburban manhunt that finally ends in the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ( Alex Wolff) in nearby Watertown, Mass. Chief among them is Tommy Saunders ( Wahlberg), a Boston cop nursing a knee injury — a composite of true- life officers — who’s at ground zero when the makeshift explosives go off at the finish line and wreak havoc on runners and spectators alike.
In Berg’s signature handheld camerawork, the director introduces all the players in the context of the fateful day and weaves together their stories in the aftermath. Tommy’s loving wife ( Michelle Monaghan) visits him at the race just before the nightmarish chaos erupts, young couple Patrick ( Christopher O’Shea) and Jessica ( Rachel Brosnahan) are injured and split up in the confusion, and Chinese student Dun Meng ( Jimmy O. Yang) survives being carjacked by Tsarnaev and brother Tamerlan ( Themo Melikidze) when the bad guys are on the run.
As he did in last year’s disaster film Deepwater Horizon ( also with Wahlberg), Berg crafts a strong and intensely blast sequence on the marathon route that gets up close and personal with its grotesque horror: The camera is right at street level to show the emotional impact of the carnage while never being gratuitous or in bad taste.
The filmmaker weaves in real footage where possible to add to the overall authenticity while dramatically rendering many of the key sequences that captured America’s attention — J. K. Simmons, who plays a local Watertown sheriff, figures into a tension- filled nighttime shootout that pits the terrorist siblings against law enforcement.
Wahlberg exudes a watchable, good- hearted machismo as Tommy, especially in a poignant speech on love vs. hate. John Goodman and Kevin Bacon engage in scenery- chewing conflict as a headstrong Boston police commissioner and an embattled FBI agent respectively, and TV’s
Supergirl Melissa Benoist breaks from goody two- shoes type as Tamerlan’s American wife, a woman determined to not break when interrogated by feds.
Co- written by Berg, the screenplay gets a little busy trying to introduce its large cast in the first 20 minutes, though its timeline settles into a nice tick- tock groove as the action turns procedural in tracking down its main antagonists.