FILM OF THE WEEK
Patriots Day Cert 15A: Now showing
When your lead protagonist is a Bostonian copper in the middle of a crisis, the gig is only ever going to Mark “blue-collar” Wahlberg. While it’d be easy to imagine writer-director Peter Berg yelling “get me Wahlberg on the phone”, the pair have made beautiful music together before, with the well-received Lone Survivor (2013) and last year’s superb Deepwater Horizon.
The real-life catastrophe Berg charts so deftly this time is the horrific Boston Marathon bombing (and subsequent manhunt) of 2013, which claimed the lives of five victims. Wahlberg plays fictional flatfoot Sgt Tommy Saunders, who is placed alongside a host of excellently illustrated characters at the narrative starting line by Berg and co-writers Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer. Their mornings are filled with banality and calm but you understand that only some of these lives will reach the finish line.
Among them are a young couple in love, a college security guard, a Chinese student and JK Simmons’s ageing suburban cop. Linking these disparate but sturdily woven strands are the attackers, the adolescent Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff ) and more hardened brother Tamerlan.
This human cross-section, spliced archive clips and visceral location shooting, create a throbbing sense of the city’s pulse that becomes the engine of Patriots Day. As with Deepwater Horizon, Berg brings the situation to the boil with masterful intuition, and he doesn’t waste time trying to rationalise the killers’ hatred. When the FBI machine (led by Kevin Bacon’s chief) swoops onto the scene of the massacre, a fine monument to the victims becomes a gripping and sophisticated police procedural. Very hard to pick holes in.