Try as I might, I cannot be completely objective in reviewing this film. I was born and raised an hour outside of Boston, this is my home. On April 15th, 2013, I was a junior in high school and had just finished touring Northeastern. I was with my best friend and his parents, along with a couple other close friends. It was about 2:45pm when we decided to head toward the finish line to watch the tail end of the Marathon. As we walked from Huntington Ave. toward Boylston St., I noticed a woman walking toward us who was crying while talking on the phone. Not an atypical sight. But as we got to the Prudential, I saw more and more people walking towards us, crying harder and talking more frantically. Now pretty certain that something bad had happened, my friends and I tried to check news sites on our phones to see what was going on. Every server was jammed. After a few failed attempts at online research, we asked someone what was upsetting everyone. “Something blew up at the Marathon finish line. Some kind of bomb. It’s horrible down there.” We stopped in our tracks. I didn’t understand how something like that could happen here, or why it would happen here. Once the immediate shock wore off, we turned back around and, per the orders of the Boston Police Department, found a safe location to shelter-in-place. For the remainder of the afternoon, we stayed in the UNO on Huntington Ave with dozens of people trying to get in contact with their loved ones. We sat in a booth toward the back of the restaurant, where a television on the wall played CNN’s coverage of the bombing. I have never been, and hope to never be again, so simultaneously scared and confused. Though fortunately I was not as directly affected by the Boston Marathon bombings as some were, it was still a terrifying event for me. Perhaps it was my being in the city at the time, or the fact that I’ve spent my entire life living in Massachusetts, but I felt a loss that day. When I heard of Mark Wahlberg’s plans to make a film about this day, I was instantly skeptical. Commercializing a tragedy so soon after it happened seemed incredibly inappropriate. Even after seeing the movie, I’m still not sure that now was the time to make this film. That being said, Patriots Day is an emotional, powerful, and intense film that pays tribute to the victims of the bombing and the members of law enforcement who brought the bombers to justice.
Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg team up yet again to make Patriots Day. The pair previously worked on Lone Survivor and this year’s Deepwater Horizon. If Berg’s filmography proves anything, it’s that he can make halfway decent films about tragic and intense real-life events. Patriots Day follows that very schema. As a director, Berg’s strong suit appears to be depicting the chaos of a tragedy. The techniques he uses in this film are nearly identical to those he used in Deepwater Horizon: shaky cam, intense sound effects, gratuitous gore. Not to say those methods aren’t effective: they’re just simple, expected, and adherent to Berg’s formulaic approach to filmmaking. A major aspect of the film that deviates from Berg’s formula is Wahlberg’s character. Instead of playing the real-life hero of the story, Wahlberg plays a fictional composite character, Tommy Saunders, whose story is the combination of that of several Boston police officers who sprung into action on the 2013 Marathon Monday. Saunders is somehow integral to every stage of the investigation, making Wahlberg seem like the hero of the story. I understand wanting to represent the Boston Police Department as a whole without crowding the narrative, but the use of Saunders makes one officer seem chiefly responsible for bringing the Tsarnaevs to justice. Finding who was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing was undeniably a team effort executed by the Boston Police Department, the FBI, and the Watertown Police Department. Each part of this whole could’ve been better represented in the film.
A positive feature of the film is the use of real surveillance footage from the investigation to supplement the narrative about the Tsarnaevs. The two bombers were so well cast that the real footage was used seamlessly. Had I not seen the video before, I likely wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t filmed specifically for the movie. What was problematic about the Tsarnaevs as characters, though, was the sheer volume of dialogue and screen time they were given. The scenes in which they’re shown try to give the viewer a peek into the inner workings of their minds and into the relationship between these two brothers. This is tricky, however, because how much do we really know about these people? Secondhand stories and testimonies from Dzhokhar’s trial can only fuel speculation. I understand the need to flesh out the characters for the sake of making an interesting movie, but they are given a bit more of a spotlight than they should have.
The most moving part of the film is the final few minutes, which includes clips of interviews with the real members of law enforcement and the real survivors of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. These moments show the impact that this tragedy had on real individuals, as well as the City of Boston as a whole. Accuracy should be the main concern in doing a story like this justice, and although some of the sequences were surely dramatized to meet Hollywood expectations, Patriots Day is a fine film that showcases the triumph of those who survived, the bravery of those who helped them, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Grade: B
Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg team up yet again to make Patriots Day. The pair previously worked on Lone Survivor and this year’s Deepwater Horizon. If Berg’s filmography proves anything, it’s that he can make halfway decent films about tragic and intense real-life events. Patriots Day follows that very schema. As a director, Berg’s strong suit appears to be depicting the chaos of a tragedy. The techniques he uses in this film are nearly identical to those he used in Deepwater Horizon: shaky cam, intense sound effects, gratuitous gore. Not to say those methods aren’t effective: they’re just simple, expected, and adherent to Berg’s formulaic approach to filmmaking. A major aspect of the film that deviates from Berg’s formula is Wahlberg’s character. Instead of playing the real-life hero of the story, Wahlberg plays a fictional composite character, Tommy Saunders, whose story is the combination of that of several Boston police officers who sprung into action on the 2013 Marathon Monday. Saunders is somehow integral to every stage of the investigation, making Wahlberg seem like the hero of the story. I understand wanting to represent the Boston Police Department as a whole without crowding the narrative, but the use of Saunders makes one officer seem chiefly responsible for bringing the Tsarnaevs to justice. Finding who was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing was undeniably a team effort executed by the Boston Police Department, the FBI, and the Watertown Police Department. Each part of this whole could’ve been better represented in the film.
A positive feature of the film is the use of real surveillance footage from the investigation to supplement the narrative about the Tsarnaevs. The two bombers were so well cast that the real footage was used seamlessly. Had I not seen the video before, I likely wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t filmed specifically for the movie. What was problematic about the Tsarnaevs as characters, though, was the sheer volume of dialogue and screen time they were given. The scenes in which they’re shown try to give the viewer a peek into the inner workings of their minds and into the relationship between these two brothers. This is tricky, however, because how much do we really know about these people? Secondhand stories and testimonies from Dzhokhar’s trial can only fuel speculation. I understand the need to flesh out the characters for the sake of making an interesting movie, but they are given a bit more of a spotlight than they should have.
The most moving part of the film is the final few minutes, which includes clips of interviews with the real members of law enforcement and the real survivors of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. These moments show the impact that this tragedy had on real individuals, as well as the City of Boston as a whole. Accuracy should be the main concern in doing a story like this justice, and although some of the sequences were surely dramatized to meet Hollywood expectations, Patriots Day is a fine film that showcases the triumph of those who survived, the bravery of those who helped them, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Grade: B
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