Lone Survivor

Well-written reviews should include a bit of plot summary so readers unfamiliar with the art can still follow along.

I’ll try to write this review well, but I really don’t think I can give you more than a couple sentences of plot with “Lone Survivor” having a fatal flaw. There’s no plot.

But we’ll get to that in a second.

In “Lone Survivor,” we get to watch Mark Wahlberg, as Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, and his team of trained marksmen set out to kill a Taliban leader.

The mission is botched and the team is left stranded, with no communication in the middle of a seemingly endless number of Taliban soldiers trying to kill them.
Wahlberg makes it out of the fight alive and retreats to a nearby village where he is treated with hospitality until the military comes to rescue him.

The story “Lone Survivor” tells is a noble one — one with guts and more than one morally nauseating decision to be made, but I can’t help but feel that this film didn’t do the tale justice.

At the very foundation of my complaints, I feel as if two-thirds of the movie is spent in a firefight.

It is frustrating because there is only so much artistic expression or, even at the very root, story to be gained from spending almost 90 minutes in a shootout.

I couldn’t tell you how the acting in this film was because aside from Wahlberg, I didn’t really get the chance to see anyone else act. Just the panting and yelling of a firefight.
“Lone Survivor” also fails to give its audience a context for the lives of these soldiers — a reason for us to care.

We see some props from life back home, but we never attach a face to the reason these soldiers want to make it out alive.

There seems to be a brotherhood and camaraderie theme going on. But we never see anything of the relationships between the soldiers, so we never really care all that much when one of them dies.

My remaining qualms with “Lone Survivor” lie in some of its amateurish technical and directing choices.

Director Peter Berg seems intent on bringing out the claustrophobia in all of us with his unrelenting stream of extreme close-up shots of, well, everything.

The slideshow at the end is perhaps a bit hammed up, and some of the music choices  — or lack thereof — are strange.

“Lone Survivor” has a lot of merit to stand on and, despite my tirade of complaints, is really a good film.

When it’s on, it’s on. The suspense is gripping much of the time, its heart is very much in the right place, its emotion and pride are real and Wahlberg’s performance is phenomenal.

It’s just a letdown in the end because the full potential for this film is pretty easy to see. It just never clicked.

The tears “Lone Survivor” was absolutely begging me to cry just never came.

Sadly, “Lone Survivor” will not stand on the pedestal of great war films and be remembered in decades to come — and I say “sadly” because this is a story that deserves to be known.