9. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
I’ve never been a Michael Bay fan. He has an audience, and that’s fine, but even his supposedly “better” movies, like Pain & Gain and The Rock, left me pretty cold. I’ve found them all (at least, the ones I’ve seen; I never got around to the Bad Boys films or Armageddon) to be fairly tacky, tedious and prolonged in their own ways. The Island was probably the closest he’s ever come to a good movie, in my mind, and that’s okay-at-best. My expectations for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, therefore, were admittedly low, and while this one earned a few more admirers than some of Bay’s other films, I didn’t find it better than anything else the wannabe auteur has made in the last few years. In fact, if anything, I found it to be a little more insulting than normal.
I admire Bay for not taking a hard political stance in this film, instead focusing the soldiers and their fearless commitment to this country. At least, that would be the focus, if Bay could differentiate any of these soldiers —besides our lead, played by a beefed-up John Krasinski — from one another, especially during their nighttime combat sequences. What results, then, is a noisy-at-best and exploitative-at-worst real-life tragedy given the schlocky Bay treatment, much like the director’s 2001 blunder, Pearl Harbor (but not quite as disrespectful). He even shamelessly recreates the same “iconic” bomb-dropping shot from that precise film in this one, though not as well or as effectively. 13 Hours is the first Bay film I saw in the theaters, which is perhaps why I disliked it so intensely. It’s everything I hated about the director’s other films, now without the comfort of the pause button, the remote to turn down the volume or any access to the kitchen. It’s exhausting. It’s mind-numbing. It’s aggravating. It’s Bay.
