Patriot's Day (***1/2)

To make a movie about a terrorist attack that happened no more than 3 years ago is questionable in many regards. When studios made 'United 93' five years after September 11th, I seem to recall the uproar of disbelief; statements of "it's too soon" and "this is disrespectful to the victims." With the Boston Bombing, I'm not sure it's too soon, but there are questionable aspects about the movie itself that might raise a few eyebrows.

Director Peter Berg has found himself a curiously specific niche by telling real life tragedies with Mark Wahlberg as his hero. He did it with 'Lone Survivor' and in 2016 with 'Deepwater Horizon.' Whether or not I believe Mark Wahlberg as an everyman (I don't), there is clearly something that the actor does that Berg believes in. In the first two instances, they were real-life characters. Here, I was surprised to learn, is a police officer written solely as a fictional resource to progress the plot. Why we even need a hero is another story, since the film is told as an ensemble, flashing back and forth between 5 or 6 stories. We meet a local police chief who does little in the story until the end when we find out he was the one that actually shot one of the terrorists. We meet a security guard who has a crush on a college student but then later realize his ties to the bombing.

It's a faithful retelling of the incidents, beginning the morning of the marathon and concluding when the final suspect was found hiding in a small sailboat in a stranger's backyard. The interweaving of stories is probably necessary to cover an adequate amount of facts, and yet I still found myself wondering why they needed to fictionalize a police officer (Walhberg) when the city was littered with real people who acted as heroes in these horrific conditions. We meed Ed Davis (John Goodman), the Commissioner who worked to release the photos of the attackers to the public swiftly, and we meet the Federal Officer in charge of the case, Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) who wants to break the case but doesn't realize the passion of the citizens of Boston who also want to lend assistance. It was great police work that went into the capture of the Tsarnaev brothers, and yet the film would have us believe that Mark Wahlberg single-handedly worked out all the riddles and clues.

I've felt this many times before, but in a lot of ways a documentary might have been better suited to serve the material at hand. Why we need to fictionalize something so fresh in the public's mind is a debate that has been going on for years. It's not surprising that it only took 3 years for the film to come out (and would you believe it that there is a second Boston Bombing movie coming out this year starring Jake Gyllenhaal?). The extraordinary thing about the attack was the way the city rallied together to help, and in fact the most emotional parts of the film come at it's conclusion when we see the real people via real footage talking about the way their lives were forever changed. Hollywood can certainly work magic, but there's sometimes nothing more powerful than the truth.