Act Of Valor
- Year:2012
- Rating:MA
- Director:Mike McCoy, Scott Waugh
- Cast:Nestor Serrano , Roselyn Sanchez, Alex Veadov
- Release Date:May 03, 2012
- Distributor:Roadshow
- Running time:110 minutes
- Film Worth:$0.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Despite its emphasis on facts, this feels void of authenticity, from the simplistic script and thinly drawn characters to the poor acting and exploitative editing.
Real-life Navy Seals (uncredited because of their active status) play a Special Forces unit, dispatched to Costa Rica to extract a kidnapped CIA operative (Roselyn Sanchez) who has vital intelligence on a Chechen Terrorist named Abu Shabal (Jason Cottle), the latter of whom is planning an imminent attack on US soil. The team track Shabal across the globe from Somalia to Mexico in an effort to apprehend him and thwart his plans to infiltrate the US.
While the marketing pushes its authenticity, ultimately the film could not be any more inauthentic. Kurt Johnstad's script is simplistic and the characterisations woefully underdeveloped, not helped by the leads' total lack of acting ability. The action sequences are terrifically well handled (no surprise given co-director Scott Waugh's stunt background), yet the dialogue scenes play like badly executed cut scenes from a game, hardly an issue as the 14-25 year-old male gamer seems to be the target demographic.
Although the emphasis is on factually based depictions of Seal missions, by shooting and cutting the action like a Michael Bay film (with P.O.V gaming angles) and using on-screen game-like info-graphics to ‘sexy up' the action, it manipulates reality. Regardless of whether the leads are real-life Special Ops or not, the sentiments depicted are far more powerfully and truthfully conveyed within the documentary format, as with the late Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's Restrepo. Such depictions of the reality of military life give rise to complex questions; the men and women who serve in our armed forces deserve to have their lives depicted with truth and voracity, not through the perverted veneer of a sub-par action film.
