Lone Survivor - Cinema Review

'kill a handful of unarmed witnesses or scupper the mission? The very fact that the film presents this choice as a difficult one is evidence that something went very wrong with some of the governing morals in the conflict this film depicts'

Lone Survivor celebrates the heroism of four US military personnel by showing how they shot dead a stupendous number of people and, in that way, provides a very interesting text for how film will deal with this generation's conflicts on screen.

Arguably a tough sell outside of the US marketplace, Peter Berg's film deals with the events of Operation Red Wings, a US military initiative which, you suspect, is more familiar to those on the other side of the Atlantic than to UK residents. How else, you wonder - as Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster set off into the wilds of Afghanistan - does it justify its decidedly spolier-ish title?

Thus encamped in the wilderness, in pursuit of a high-ranking Taliban operative, Berg hits a problem which his film never entirely overcomes and which films covering this period have similarly wrestled with. Clearly there were acts of heroism in Arghanistan, as there were on other battlefields, but approaching a conflict whose outcomes still seem to be uncertain and troublesome in somewhat of a celebratory manner feels difficult, to say the least. There's a key scene where Luttrell (Wahlberg) and Murphy's (Kitsch) squad are faced with a decision; kill a handful of unarmed witnesses or scupper the mission? The very fact that the film presents this choice as a difficult one is evidence that something went very wrong with some of the governing morals in the conflict this film depicts: deciding between war crimes and the correct course should be a decision so mundane it doesn't warrant focus. Here it is celebrated as notable.

Beyond the moral quandaries - and this feels like a film treading a very careful, if jingoistic, line around them - there are problems with Lone Survivor which make it an occasionally tough watch. After the tense setup, Berg seems to abandon all notion of subtlety, throwing his central quartet into a forest battle which seems to last an absolute age. Scenes that could essentially be repeated shots show up again and again with the four soldiers ducking amongst wilderness and, occasionally, throwing themselves down bone-crunching cliff-falls as the only means of survival.

If the plotting and action in these moments damage Lone Survivor, the casting threatens to sink it completely. Wahlberg and Kitsch are fine, the latter in particular very believable as the larger-than-life squad leader, but Foster and Hirsch are spectacularly miss-cast. Perhaps Foster nearly survives it but doesn't convince the longer you go in. How anyone though thought that Hirsch was suitable for this sort of thing is beyond me. In later moments, wild-eyed with fear and shock, near-ranting, he can't help but bring to mind Jack Black in Tropic Thunder. It is not a good look and someone should have told him so very early on.

Eventually Berg reaches a muddy ending where, despite the heroism of a group of Afghanis, it is very obviously the Americans who jet in to save the day. Perhaps that is exactly how it happened, but in a story with this level of broken tale-telling, it feels like something of a mute point. Is this tragedy, docu-Thriller, Action film, human interest tale or heart-rending catastrophe? A dissatisfying mess of all of them perhaps, and in that way, perhaps it does indeed say something about this century's foreign conflicts.

Lone Survivor is released in UK cinemas on Friday 31st January.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.