"Man Down" is an exasperating movie, stuffed with self-importance, short on drama, chained to the kind of crazy script that can only work if the film is crazy entertaining. Would that it were so simple.
What we have here isn't a typical war movie, or much of a movie at all. It is a batty military thriller flip-flopping between a dystopian future and Marine training drill scenes, psychiatric interviewing and Afghan urban warfare. That alone is the sort of jumbled oddity that would put many film crews, and viewers, in the asylum. This one also includes grim family melodrama between Shia LaBoeuf as troubled vet Gabe and Kate Mara as his challenging wife, Natalie, their conflicted marriage adding the final straw to writer/director Dito Montiel's haystack of timelines.
In the opening, America has apparently been destroyed by bio-terrorist enemies. We later see a pre-apocalypse Bill O'Reilly predicting it on TV, so that must be correct, though the bomb-scarred aftermath suggests subpar CGI green-screen effects.
Projecting the throbbing aura of a holy martyr, Gabe plays run, gun, hide and seek in the cratered cityscape of his hometown. He's searching for his apparently kidnapped son, but with his seriously unkempt facial hair, LaBoeuf looks as if he's doing survival make-believe as an extra on "Duck Dynasty."
Perhaps his battleground is actually internal. Our earliest views of Gabe show him as a patriotic young man and loving father, with later events leaving him disillusioned on both fronts. Throughout the story we time-travel back to Gabe's meeting with a military psychiatrist assigned to assess him after "the incident." That shadowy combat catastrophe has left him strongly square-jawed but silently shedding an occasional tear. Gary Oldman, who doesn't seem to have much fondness for most of the movies he appears in, is true to form here, playing the counselor with studied indifference.
Gabe's winding path to what may be hallucinatory post-traumatic stress is revealed ever so slowly, piece by piece. He is devastated by a raid gone wrong at an Afghan sniper's apartment with disastrous consequences. Discovering a private act of personal dishonesty by his old friend and combat buddy Devin (Jai Courtney, offering the film's most credible character) triggers a fit of moral outrage. An increasing sense of separation from his stateside family while he's fighting overseas pushes him to the brink.
Montiel's handling of blood and guts action scenes is as competent as anything that could be seen in a dozen other films by Peter Berg or Michael Bay, but his work on passages focused on the characters is spotty at best. Here, as in most of his recent work, the 29-year-old LaBoeuf has proved he's matured beyond his days as a boyish beginner. Unlike his contemporary Zac Efron, LaBoeuf is investing thoroughly in challenging, unorthodox roles. A true method actor, he still bears the visible scars he cut on his face to seem realistic in 2014's World War II movie "Fury."
But like his "Man Down" co-stars, he shows that a committed performance can't save an underdeveloped character. His best scene comes in a simple dialogue as he drops his son Johnathan off at school, where he turns the military S.O.S. term "man down" into a code for "I love you" so other kids won't tease him. Young Charlie Shotwell and LaBoeuf make a charming duo.
Unfortunately, their unforced work together is a tiny sidebar to a meandering mystery. Whether Gabe's science fiction nightmare is a shell-shocked soldier's fantasy, the real deal, a daydream sparked by an estranged marriage or a metaphor for the nation's indifferent treatment of returning veterans is open for speculation until the final moments. Which, given the film's molasses-slow 90-minute running time, can't arrive soon enough.
