Review: Michael Bay surprises by making an actual good movie about Benghazi in ‘13 Hours’

Posted on January 22, 2016

By MARK VIOLA

It’s impossible for me to go into a movie inside a vacuum, especially considering how much film news I read on a weekly basis, but I do my best to give every movie I watch and  review the benefit of the doubt.

That was admittedly hard with director Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.” First of all, I’m not a huge fan of the idea of making movies about very recent events, especially if they involve people dying. It just seems a little macabre. The first film I ever reviewed professionally was “World Trade Center,” which debuted in theaters just five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and now we have this film just four years after the insurgent attack which left several Americans dead in Libya, including a U.S. ambassador.

My second issue was if somebody had to make a film about Benghazi, which has been incredibly politicized over the years, Bay wouldn’t be my first choice. Let’s face it, he hasn’t had a truly good film–I consider the first “Transformers” decent at best–since “Armageddon,” and that is going back to 1998.

So I went into “13 Hours” with pretty low expectations, and I was honestly quite surprised with how good a war movie this is. Will we remember it years from now? Probably not. But the film, in addition to providing a very tension-filled 144 minutes, it is a well-acted and, dare I say it, well-directed movie.

While the story doesn’t shy away from interagency bickering and chain-of-command snafus which exacerbated an already bad situation, it avoids much of the overtly political fodder by instead focusing on the soldiers on the ground and what they knew at the time, which wasn’t much. The six CIA contractors were protecting a secret compound about a mile away from the U.S. diplomatic outpost which would come under attack on Sept. 11, 2012.

We know Bay can present compelling action scenes and for once he has a solid script–to fill in the gaps between the explosions–written by novelist Chuck Hogan (“The Strain”) and based on the book by Mitchell Zuckoff. Bay might not have been my first choice, but if we had to have a movie about Benghazi, at least we got one about the actual people there and not the political sideshows that followed.

I can’t say I enjoyed the movie, especially considering real people died during the events being depicted, but “13 Hours” is a surprisingly good film that is well worth watching if you’re interested.

The film is rated R for strong combat violence throughout, bloody images and language.

(This is a abbreviated version of the full review available in our printed or e-edition papers.)

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