Packed with verisimilitude and visceral punch, "Patriots Day" is a harrowing film, and one not to be missed. It joins the ranks of outstanding American docu-tragedies like "United 93," "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Captain Phillips," dramatizing a grim episode of recent history in nearly flawless form. It works in a manner so taut and controlled that its very craftsmanship elevates the experience of watching terrorism and its aftermath unfold.
The subject is the days before and after 2013's Boston Marathon bombings, when two homemade pressure-cooker explosives killed three and injured more than 260 others. It is destruction, chaos, manhunt, shootout and capture on an epic scale.
The film re-creates much of the story with images echoing (and sometimes using) hundreds of surveillance videos that recorded the attack, creating a gripping sense of you-are-there panic.
And it pushes deeper in prologue scenes, intimately introducing the terrorist brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and bystanders of their upcoming attack through staged breakfast table and bedroom scenes that mostly feel close enough to justify the poetic license. They add a vivid layer to characters who otherwise might feel anonymous. Everybody in this film is somebody, even the desk jockey politicians and FBI outsiders racing to turn the post-blast bedlam into a coherent security response.
This is the third reality-based disaster film from filmmaking partners Mark Wahlberg, operating here as leading man and producer, and Peter Berg, who co-wrote the script and directed. They have developed a solid movie brand by mixing real-life calamities with Hollywood drama. They know precisely how to play to their audience, celebrating the human spirit with grenade-like action, facts and realistic-seeming make believe.
In the pair's 2014 collaboration, "Lone Survivor," Wahlberg was the title character, one of four Navy SEAL combatants ambushed by Taliban forces in Afghanistan. "Deepwater Horizon," released just four months ago, cast him as the electronics technician on an oil drilling rig off the Louisiana coast as it headed toward a series of explosions that would kill 11 crew members and cause the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history.
In all these films, Wahlberg's a workingman with integrity. If he had a nickname, he'd be called "Sarge." He is as confused and anxious as you or I would be in the same circumstances _ and a million times better.
In "Patriots Day" he plays one of its few fictional speaking characters. Tommy Saunders is a composite of Boston police officers. He's wicked Massachusetts funny, nicely balanced between intrepid and cynical, running a messy, bittersweet marriage with Carol (Michelle Monaghan), whose job as a nurse is a bit of additional foreshadowing. Tommy isn't the man in charge, but his guts and street smarts are a crucial piece of the puzzle. Several pieces, in fact; he's the star here.
The film is the opposite of a mystery, but it still boils with suspense. While the broad strokes of the story are familiar enough, the procedural detail is nail-biting stuff. How is an improvised explosive device constructed? How can hospitals handle casualties from a monstrous attack against civilians? How do investigators piece together a list of suspects with random video from crowded stores around the Boylston Street finish line? What is a cop to do with no information when his whole family asks, "Was it al-Qaida?"
There is almost too much to praise here. Convincing attention is paid to the roles private citizens played in the search; Jimmy O. Yang is outstanding as Dun Meng, a motorist carjacked by the fleeing bombers. (The real-life Meng plays a restaurant patron.) And the conflict-laden partnership between the Tsarnaev brothers (Themo Melikidze as the ruthless new father Tamerlan and Alex Wolff as clueless tag-along terrorist Dzhokhar) is rich enough to be a film on its own.
There are creative episodes that seem inaccurate and misleading. Khandi Alexander plays an Islamist interrogator in a scene that feels like a discordant clip from "24." But the film as a whole is so slickly executed that quibbles don't apply. A stupendous cast of character actors play real parties in the disaster _ FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon), Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons) and more _ who seem doubly authentic when the witnesses to history appear at the finale.
By the time it races roughshod over the catastrophe to its rather idealistic conclusion, you don't feel like you've taken guilty pleasure in watching a morbid re-enactment of other people's suffering. You feel like there are good people working hard to guard against something this barbaric ever happening again. What could have been a simplistic Michael Bay flag-waver emerges as something more meaningful. It even considers how having a leg amputated won't prevent some souls from running with a prosthetic.
Movies sometimes have curative powers, and this one is a strong dose of heroic idealism to combat nihilistic gloom.
