“Act of Valor” may pay homage to the “B movie” genre, but today this
genre can contain innovative special effects and imaginative action sequences ,
even if short on plot – as studios like Lionsgate, Summit, and Screen Gems
prove, and now Relativity Media (normally connected to “I Am Rogue” and either
Universal or Sony) demonstrate with the
genre military thriller “Act of Valor”.
The film, set in the present day of about 2011 or so, outdoes earlier efforts like “Navy Seals” and “Collateral
Damage”, even if it’s likely to be forgotten quickly.
The film, directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, opens with
an eye-splitting commando raid by Navy Seals and rescue of a battered CIA agent
(Roselyn Sanchez) from a drug-cartel’s compound in Costa Rica. That takes up the first third of the film
(after an introductory sequence set in the Philippines), but then comes the “plot
twist”. The Seals discover connections
to a ring determined to bring suicide bombers into the US through a hidden border
tunnel near San Diego. The weapon
comprises a vest with plastic glue and a particular ceramic buckshot to produce
shrapnel. The vests are being “manufactured”
in the Ukraine, and handed off in Somalia and other places in the South
Pacific. The rest of the film, predictably, concerns the efforts of the Seals
to interdict the plot in all the major choke points.
Now it’s rather unlikely that this “weapon” is very
original; this sort of thing has been used against Israel for years. And it’s also unlikely that it would take
such an elaborate plot, requiring widely scattered locations around the World,
to pull off. It’s probably not Navy
Seals who would shut something like this down; it’s ordinary law enforcement
and police departments, and alert citizens.
And Hollywood (as in the recent TV series “Missing”) has
this obsession with CIA work, as if it consisted of gunslinging agents from
Westerns. Actually, most analysts (from
what I’m told) find the work tedious and repetitive, and very ordinary
day-to-day.
I saw this film on a Saturday afternoon at the Regal in
Arlington in a small but adequate auditorium (Regal could enlarge the screens (for 2.35:1 as in this film without vertical cropping) in small
auditoriums by lifting the screen above the fire exit doors.) There was still a fair crowd for this film
that’s been around for a month or more.
The official site is here.
Here is Relativity’s Superbowl ad.
Picture (mine): Texas
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