Wouldn’t it be great if, just for once, movies that purport to be true stories were actually true stories?
Patriots Day concerns the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, and the ensuing hunt to bring the Tsarnaev brothers (Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze) to justice. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), FBI Special Agent Rick DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon), Watertown Police Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Michael Beach), and other such figures come together to investigate the tragedy.
But for whatever reason, the makers decided they needed a totally made-up protagonist in the form of Sgt. Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg), a Boston cop that somehow just so happens to be at every major event. Not helping matters is his cliché introduction as a loose cannon who’s coming off suspension and trying to get back into Davis’s good graces. To their credit, this is abandoned as soon as he experiences the bombing and is profoundly shaken.
Wahlberg sells it all fine enough, but not enough to overlook his character’s very presence. There is absolutely no valid reason for the real people who performed those tasks in real life to be erased for bogus hero. And only a mere three years after the event, there is also no reason for there to be any sort of audience POV device. We all remember that day and how we felt about it.
The narrative does that thing where it switches up between several storylines, but it’s less Zodiac, and more God’s Not Dead. A lot of unneeded attention is given to the people who, were this a completely fictional story, would constitute the bit players (but yes, I realize this is extremely disrespectful to say about actual human beings). For example: Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), the guy the brothers carjack but later escapes. He gets scenes prior to that which really don’t offer that much. It’s one thing if he ended up dead and this was to show the life he could’ve had, but as he survives, it’s all rather pointless.
At the tail end, the picture shifts gears and goes into full documentary mode. Not just blocks of ending text with a photo or two, but minutes worth of footage and interviews with most of the actual people shown. When this goes to TV, someone surfing through will think they stumbled onto an Investigation Discovery show.
And when watching, all I can think is: why wasn’t this the movie? They were clearly able to get everyone’s full participation; just let them tell their stories and roll the cameras. But then we don’t get the big action set pieces do we? To be fair those are more than competently handled, but only up to a point. They unfortunately at times do seem exploitative, especially when one-liner catchphrases are squeezed in.
It’s a shame really, Patriots Day had great potential. The actors are good, the direction is capable, and this story is indeed one worth telling. But it falls short in light of the facts. The more you know…