Lone Survivor

‘Crack.’ ‘Splatter.’ ‘Shriek!’ ‘Splurge.’

Lone Survivor (2013) is one of the most brutal, blood-splattered war movies ever committed to celluloid. During the course of this gruelling film, hundreds of people are brutally shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in graphic, documentary detail. And yet, by the end of a juddering 121 minutes, perhaps the greatest casualty is any sense of realistic characterisation.

The plot

Based on real events, the film tells the story of a bungled operation to kill a high-level Taliban leader in Afghanistan. A small reconnaissance team is sent to discretely locate the target. But after being discovered, they quickly find themselves surrounded by the local militia.

Unable to summon help, the soldiers are forced into a desperate battle to both save their lives and come across as three-dimensional characters. (Given this is a Peter Berg film, it’s probably not giving too much away to say that the odds for either of these aren’t too promising.)

Who the hell’s in this?

Funky bunch rapper, hamburger entrepreneur and occasional actor Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell – the titular character. Naturally, everyone else in the cast is expendable cannon fodder. (The clue’s kind of in the title.)

Making up the rest of Wahlberg’s condemned team are Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch and Taylor Kitsch – an actor whose vacant, surfer dude persona and wooden acting are reminiscent of a younger, slightly less convincing, Keanu Reeves. When they’re hiding out in a forest at one point, it’s actually hard to spot Kitsch among all those other prime hunks of timber.

Further target practice for the Taliban is provided by perennial movie corpse, Eric Bana. Having met a sticky-end in Star Trek, Troy, The Time Traveller’s Wife, and Hanna, Eric’s not really the guy you’d want to see leading your rescue mission.

And sure enough, as soon as everyone’s least favourite Hulk tries to save Wahlberg, he gets an RPG straight up his jacksy. Only Sean Bean has a ‘death reel’ to rival the Aussie lunk.

The good

While Berg has little interest in narrative niceties such as plot and character development, he is at least keen to depict war in all its visceral hell. This lack of squeamishness results in some of most intense combat scenes Exploding Helicopter has ever encountered – filled with pulse-pounding tension, fear, and confusion.

Mark Wahlberg and his doomed co-stars

There’s an almost giddy portrayal of realistic, close-quarters violence. Forget those films where characters heroically dismiss injuries as ‘flesh wounds’ before bounding-off to perform Herculean feats of bravery. Here, war really hurts.

Outnumbered and outgunned, our heroes are not so much injured as gradually mutilated by the punishing array of guns, rockets and grenades ranged against them. Bones break, limbs are shot-off, and blood pumps furiously from gaping wounds. An episode of Casualty, this is not.

The most powerful scene in the film sees the surviving soldiers try to escape their pursuers by throwing themselves down a steep cliff. As they hurtle uncontrollably down the slope, the sound and camerawork makes you feel like you’re experiencing every impact as they smash into trees, rocks and boulders. By the time they get to the bottom, it feels like you’ve careened down the cliff yourself.

The bad 

While Peter Berg’s sledgehammer approach to film-making brings vitality to the combat scenes, it poses big problems whenever the actors have to do some of that old-fashioned ‘acting’ stuff that used to be so popular.

The film has barely begun before our heroes, in a series of entirely unnatural conversations, unload a heavy barrage of character exposition. They shell the viewer with unnecessary stories about how much they love their families, and engage in much strained bros-in-arms joshing.

It’s all utterly unconvincing: the scenes are simply there to establish each character as action movie stereotype A, B or C. So by the time Taylor Kitsch starts yakking away about his upcoming marriage, he may as well hold up a sign saying: ‘Dead by the end of the second act’.

(It’s a well-known staple of these movies that no character ever mentions impending nuptials, or even looks fondly on a pic of a ‘special gal back home’, without getting solidly murdered to death within the hour.)

Eric Bana: world's worst rescue team leader

Notably absent from all this emotional elucidation is Mark Wahlberg. As anyone familiar with war films knows: the man with the least to live for is the guy who gets to go home. So when the Wahlburger tells us that all he wants to do on getting back to the States is chop down the tree in his garden we can be sure he’ll make it to the end credits.

(And in fairness, standing next to a big lump of wood will probably remind him of all those good times with Taylor Kitsch.)

Such character problems were readily apparent in Berg’s previous film Battleship, a movie exclusively populated by cardboard cut-outs – including a mono-featured Rhianna, who has arguably shown more expressionistic range in those innumerable tweeted photos of her own arse.

So flimsy was the characterisation that the actors wore t-shirts with ‘Navy’ and ‘Army’, as if that was the most interesting thing about them. Often, it was.

The unwatchable

Fatally, Lone Survivor includes a credit that has marked the death knell for many a movie: ‘Made with the full cooperation of the US Army’. Inevitably, this translates into unending scenes of flag-waving, tub-thumping jingoism.

The film’s opening is little more than a glorified recruitment video for the US armed forces where soldiers are lectured on the values that make them men: honour, loyalty and comradeship. Hu-ah!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the whole thing is rounded off with a lachrymose cover version of David Bowie’s Heroes. At some points, the whole thing veers dangerously close to Team America’s ‘Fuck, yeah!’ territory. Hail to the chief, indeed. Now, will someone pass the sick bag?

The chinnock gets an RPG up the jacksy

Exploding helicopter action

So, to our favourite casualty of war. This occurs when a big Chinnock helicopter is scrambled for a rescue mission. There’s a strong hint that the big whirlybird could be doomed as soon as we see the ill-omened Eric Bana climb on-board. (Possibly only Dracula has spent more time dead onscreen than the accident-prone Antipodean.)

It flies out to the mountain where Wahlberg and his team are trapped by the Taliban. But before reinforcements can be dropped off, one of the Afghans fires an RPG.

The missile flies straight inside the back of the whirlybird via the open loading ramp. Soldiers dodge out of the way as the rocket flies down the centre of cargo hold.

Hitting the cockpit, it ka-booms and completely severs the front half of the chopper. The dismembered helicopter falls to the ground and explodes. Ho, hum. Eric Bana killed in action once again.

Artistic merit

Whatever gripes viewers may have against Peter Berg, the lad knows how to stage an action sequence. This is a high quality, well-executed chopper fireball.

Exploding helicopter innovation

I loved how the missile flew down the inside of the Chinnock - an innovation we’ve never seen before.

Surprisingly, despite expiring so many times onscreen, this is the first time Eric Bana has been killed by an exploding helicopter. One suspects – and hopes – it won’t be the last.

Interesting fact

This indeed is a small world. Marcus Luttrell - on whose story this film is based - was friends with Chris ‘American Sniper’ Kyle, having served in the Navy Seals together.

Review by: Jafo

Munich

Munich (2005) can be summarised in just two words: everyone dies.

Steven Spielberg’s film tells the story of how Israel took revenge for the murder of its athletes at the 1972 Olympics. And bodies start piling up from the start.

We open with a graphic replay of the Munich massacre, as both hostages and terrorists are bloodily killed during the siege and a bungled police ambush.

Thereafter, the death toll rises inexorably. The Palestinians who masterminded the attack are hunted down and killed by a team of Israeli hitmen (led by Eric Bana), who are then in turn slowly killed off by the Palestinians in retaliation. Any resemblance in this endless cycle of violence to the ongoing Middle East situation is of course coincidental.

Suffice to say, by the end of the film, pretty much every character has either been shot, stabbed or blown up. (And sometimes, more than one of those things.) Still, it does save the trouble of having to remember everyone’s name.

For such a daunting mission, you might imagine Mossad would select a group of conscience-free, stone cold killers. After all, what’s needed here is a band of reptilian-blooded assassins who can maintain a laser-like focus on their job.

This, though, is a Steven Spielberg film. So, rather than a glamorised exercise in revenge-porn what we actually get is an earnest study in the morality of vengeance. Unfortunately, this requires Bana’s hit squad to be made up of quibbling aesthetes who quarrel endlessly about the ethics of their mission.

And boy, can they argue. There’s barely a scene without a bout of tetchy bickering as they tie each other up in existential knots, even while they’re supposed to be booby-trapping the hotel room of their next victim. In parts, it’s more Hollyoaks than Holy War.

The assassins bicker about ethics over a spot of lunch

As our dysfunctional team of stroppy assassins grimly continue their squabbling, I began to wonder what this mission might have looked like had it been given to Larry David, Woody Allen and Dustin Hoffman. Sure, there’d have been the same quotient of arguments and neurotic self-doubt, but at least there’d have been a few laughs.

All this intellectual self-flagellation makes Munich seem like a bizarre edition of The Moral Maze, only one where the panel punctuate their philosophical musings with an occasional car bombing.

Miraculously, despite the maelstrom of death around him, Eric Bana makes it through to the end of the film. That’s no mean feat for an actor who’s made a career out of playing characters who meet with a sticky end (Star Trek, Troy, The Time Traveller’s Wife, Hanna, et al).

Ultimately, this is good news both for Bana and for exploding helicopter fans, since he plays a pivotal role in one of the most bizarre chopper fireball scenes ever committed to celluloid.

So what happens?

After completing his mission, Bana returns home to the loving embrace of his wife but is haunted by his murderous actions. This being the Seventies – an age before psychotherapy and counselling – our Eric attempts to exorcise his demons in time-honoured male fashion by having some rumpy-pumpy with his wife.

While engaged in conjugal congress, a grim-faced Bana has a flashback to the bloody massacre at the airport during the 1972 Olympics. We see the hostages and the terrorists aboard a helicopter they’ve been given to fly out of the city. Unfortunately, the inept German police force choose this moment to start shooting at the terrorists, causing a gun battle to break out.

Bana: about to enjoy the 'helicopter explosion'

As the sequence develops, the action cuts between Bana’s increasingly sweaty thrashings and the unfolding disaster at the airport. Literally, it’s non-stop chopper action. As Bana pulls his best Eric-Clapton-playing-a-guitar-solo sexy face, the camera cuts to one of the terrorists pulling a pin from a grenade and rolling it underneath the chopper.

At this point, the scene reaches its (ahem) climax. As an impressively gurning Bana glories in his moment of orgasmic ecstasy, doubtless so do legions of exploding helicopter fans, writhing on their single men’s bedsit sofas as the aforementioned grenade blows up and destroys the chopper.

Spent, both Bana - and indeed chopper fireball fans - slump back in post-coital bliss.

Artistic merit

A giddy cocktail of sex, death and exploding helicopter - this is possibly the finest moment in Spielberg’s much lauded career as a director.

I’ve often wondered what I prefer most: sex or exploding helicopters. And now I know. I prefer my sex with exploding helicopters.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Totally unique. This is the first, and indeed only, time a helicopter explosion has been combined with a sex scene. More please.

Positives

In a film that’s a near three-hour murder-fest some light relief is provided by the cast who serve up an indigestible dog’s breakfast of accents.

The primary offenders are a curiously bewigged Daniel Craig, who jack-knifes violently between Afrikans and a dulcet northern brogue, and Eric Bana whose efforts at a Germanic lilt sound like he’s modelled it on Gruber, the camp as knickers Nazi from Allo Allo.

Surrounded by such linguistic butchery, Geoffrey Rush obviously concludes that the safest course is not to be pinned down by anything identifiable, and instead opts for an accent that can only be described as ‘foreign’.

Negatives

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but unfortunately in Munich it makes for a chilly and remote film. While the filmmaking is stately and elegant, it is ultimately a cold, hollow exercise which fails to deliver either an emotional or intellectual punch.

Interesting fact

The fact Munich doesn’t quite work may in part be a result of its hectic production schedule. Filming and editing took place simultaneously in order to get the film out in time for Oscar consideration. Perhaps fittingly, given the subject matter, it bombed.

Review by: Jafo

Listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Munich on iTunes, Stitcher, Podomatic or YourListen. Or listen here and now on the embedded player.