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'Patriots Day' Review

The latest insta-docudrama from Peter Berg

Patriots Day
Patriots Day
January 13, 2017

At its best, Patriots Day is extremely effective filmmaking: tense and nerve-wracking, Peter Berg's latest features a pair of high-intensity action sequences that replicate chaos and confusion without leaving the audience unnecessarily or cheaply disoriented.

The first of the two comes after the pair of explosions rip through the crowds gathered at the Boston Marathon's finish line in 2013, killing three and wounding dozens more. Director Berg gives us glimpses of devastation but no more; the camera doesn't linger on lost limbs or dead bodies, but lets us see bits and pieces rather than the whole. Our mind fills in the blanks but it struggles to make sense of the horrifying whole, a sensation shared by police officer Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg).

Saunders is a composite, standing in for several officers and providing a through line for the action. His work helps tie together the stories of Patrick Downes (Christopher O'Shea) and Jessica Kensky (Rachel Brosnahan), a husband and wife pair whose injuries resulted in below-the-knee amputations; FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), who led the manhunt for Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze, respectively); and Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), the Watertown officer who took charge during the dramatic shootout in the residential neighborhood in which the Tsarnaevs were finally spotted.

That shootout constitutes the other primo sequence in Patriots Day, a gun-and-pipe-bomb battle on par with Berg mentor Michael Mann's finest work in Heat and Miami Vice. Frenetic and fine-tuned, the scene is marked by both its commitment to spatial awareness—we're never left guessing where anyone is, nor is the action so chaotically pieced together in the editing bay to disorient the viewer—and also its immediacy. We feel as though we are within the fight without Berg or cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler resorting to nausea-inducing shaky cam. The violence is jarring, but never jittery.

It is too bad, given the masterful nature of these two sequences, that the rest of the film is less taut. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the attack was so recent that the urge to memorialize its victims remains strong. The subplot involving MIT police officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking), for instance, is a moving tribute to the campus cop, who was shot by the Tsarnaevs in an effort to steal his firearm. But narratively speaking focusing so much on his life trips up the action, distracting from the manhunt.

Far more powerful, and briefer, than the sequences involving Collier are the repeated shots of a Boston officer standing watch over the body of an eight-year-old bombing victim. The officer remains at attention for hours, waiting for the crime scene to be cleared, never leaving the innocent child's body (which, thankfully, we do not see). It is restrained and unsentimental yet deeply affecting and powerful, a reminder of the subtle potency the moving image can deliver.

As with previous Berg docudramas Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon—a tic shared with Hacksaw Ridge and Hidden Figures and UnbrokenPatriots Day closes with an epilogue in which we see images of the real people in the story as well as the victims of the bombing attack. I'm not quite as annoyed by these sequences as my friend Alan Zilberman, but tend to agree that they are distracting and more than a little emotionally manipulative. As a filmmaking technique, it's a handy way to short-circuit criticism or deflect questions about the necessity of some of these pictures, particularly those set in more recent times.

Published under: Movie Reviews