Patriots Day

Peter Berg’s least objectionable movie since Hancock, Patriots Day follows police officer Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg) as he and a host of law-enforcement personnel endeavor to track down the men responsible for 2013’s infamous Boston Marathon bombing. It’s immediately clear that Berg’s penchant for incoherent, relentlessly shaky camerawork is in full effect here, with the filmmaker’s aggressively unpleasant visual sensibilities holding the viewer at arms length right from the get-go – although, unlike most of Berg’s previous endeavors, Patriots Day at least benefits from an interesting storyline that generally compensates for its inept cinematography. Screenwriters Berg, Matt Cook, and Joshua Zetumer do a decent job of setting up the deadly scenario and the various characters caught in its grip, while the attack itself is handled fairly well by Berg and his director of photography, Tobias A. Schliessler (despite, again, an ongoing inability to wholeheartedly discern exactly what’s going on due to restless visuals). From there, Patriots Day morphs into an erratically-paced drama revolving almost entirely around the subsequent investigation into the bombing – with inherently compelling subject matter heightened by a smattering of above-average sequences (including an impressively gripping scene involving the kidnapping of a random bystander). The eventual showdown between the police and the now-notorious Tsarnaev siblings is visceral and exciting, to be sure, but Berg diminishes the impact of this stretch by following it with an astonishingly anti-climactic finale (which is capped off with interminable interview footage with real-life participants in the attack) – with the end result a passable endeavor that probably would’ve fared better had it been helmed by almost anyone else (ie the movie is decent in spite of Berg’s involvement rather than because of it).

**1/2 out of ****