COMMENTARY | “Act of Valor” is frankly the sort of film that we should have expected more of in the more than ten years on in the War on Terror. But in many ways it is an action/war film that has never been seen before, because the actors are real SEAL operators.
That fact is the key to the virtue of the movie. There are no big, larger than life characters among the SEAL team which is depicted. The most memorable is an operator whose wife is with child and who ardently wants to return to her to see his baby born. The movie is really about a group of men setting about their work.
And what work it is, too! The work of the SEALs, like all special operators, is to seek out the enemies of the United States, uncover their nefarious designs, and neutralize them. This they do with alacrity.
The plot is a straightforward action story. Central American narco terrorists have captured a female CIA operative and are torturing her for information. The SEALs rescue her and in the process uncover a larger plot by a Chechan terrorist mastermind to infiltrate suicide bombers wearing undetectable bomb vests to wreck death and mayhem on the American homeland. The SEALs, along with a number of military support units, set about stopping the plot.
There is none of the annoying nuance (or even outright hostility to the American military) that has been a feature of so much post 9/11 Hollywood fare. The terrorists are evil. Our guys (and gals) are good.
The one interrogation scene, which Hollywood would have done with a lot of screaming, yelling, and pistol shots to the knee cap, is done quietly, but relentlessly by a Master Chief who seems a master of psychological warfare. The action sequences, done by men who have performed them in real life, are the most heart-pounding in recent memory.
“Act of Valor” is a long overdue cinematic appreciation to the men and women who place their fragile bodies between the barbarians who would bring down our civilization and the rest of us. Their names and their deeds have gone, for the most part, unremarked. This is not right. The movie goes a ways toward correcting that fault.
Most highly recommended.
Source: Act of Valor, Yahoo Movies