13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi Review
Tweet to: @Slickster_Mag
Michael Bay is an auteur. His movies are instantly recognizable, and everything—the banter, the dizzying quick-cuts, the breakneck pace—are all very much in his style. Watch a double feature of Pearl Harbor and Transformers 2, and you’ll see the same tricks and tics. I’m not saying he’s a good director, just a recognizable one.
With 13 Hours, Bay has taken a real life event—the much-talked-about attack in Libya on September 11, 2012—and molded it into another rah-rah parade of Bayhem. It’s probably the best thing he’s done since the 90s, but that’s mostly because the film didn’t have room for rapping robot aliens.
Based on the non-fiction book by Mitchell Zuckoff, the film follows six veterans who protected the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi from 13 hours worth of attacks. If you’ve ever turned on a 24-hour news network (any of them), you’ve heard about this event. Thankfully, the film is basically apolitical, choosing to focus on the in-the-moment action instead of any sort of finger-pointing. It’s a story about heroics, about brothers-in-arms, and that’s all it’s trying to do.
[The real soldiers who fought the battle are interviewed here.]
Like a lot of bombastic Bay films, the six heroes are brave and strong and cool, and everyone else—the CIA guys, all the government people—are big old idiots who only serve to get in the way of things. I’m not saying that’s not what actually happened back in 2012, but the way the movie plays it, everyone feels a little bit like cardboard cut-outs with the label “pencil-pusher” clearly written on the name tags.
What makes this movie as enjoyable as it is, though, is that the six heroes do get the minimum amount of backstory and personality traits needed to make them three dimensional. There’s too much action in this to make room for character arcs and development, but that’s probably not why people come to a movie like this, anyway.
The action is frenetic and shaky—lots of handheld cameras and drone cameras and quick cuts between the two—but most scenes are easier to decipher than typical Bay films. There is some sense of confusion, however, because all of the main characters are big, buff, and bearded. It can get a little difficult to tell people apart.
All-in-all, this seems like the best possible version of a 21st-century Michael Bay film. It’s exciting without being overwhelming, patriotic without being preachy, and epic without being bloated. (Okay, it does feel a little bloated. But unlike Transformers 4, it doesn’t actually feel thirteen hours long.) Michael Bay has made a Michael Bay movie, and that’s really all you need to know.