Patriots Day
Director: Peter Berg
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman
Duration: 133 mins
Class: 15
KRS Releasing Ltd

Based on the horrific bombing that caused death and mayhem at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, Patriots Day charts the immediate aftermath of the tragedy which claimed three lives and injured 264, as law enforcement officers shut down the city to hunt down the perpetrators.

Directed by Peter Berg and starring his favourite actor Mark Wahlberg, the film is a solid thriller – if a little thin on characterisation – charting the events that many will be familiar with from the news at a time when terrorist attacks of this nature are all too common.

The movie opens just a few hours before the bombs go off, introducing us to various characters, based on many of the people really caught up in the bombing. Among them is detective Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg) who is serving the last day of a temporary demotion on uniformed duty on the marathon’s finishing line.

When the bombs go off, Saunders and his fellow Boston PD officers are drawn into the investigation as the FBI, led by Special Agent Richard Des Lauriers (Kevin Bacon), set up shop in the city as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), together with the city’s Mayor and the Massachusetts Governor, decide who’s calling the shots while bombing suspects Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) and his younger brother Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff) try and make their getaway across and out of the city.

Worthy though the film is in reproducing the events, its protagonists deserved to be better served

The power of the real-life story and its unlikely conclusion gives the film much of its momentum. Kudos to Berg and his co-screenwriters Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer for keeping the audience’s interest engaged despite the outcome being known to anyone following the news at the time.

The bombing itself is bloodily and efficiently recreated. The cat-and-mouse game that follows summons enough suspense as the FBI and the police carry out their meticulous, often frustratingly, futile investigation in a race against time as the press and the public hounded them for answers while they had very little intelligence to work with.. with only luck – and a very brave Chinese student – helping them giving them the break they need.

What is rather remarkable, given many Berg and Wahlberg’s penchant for creating larger than-life heroes in a movie of this ilk, is that the characters are a little less interesting than the action itself.

Wahlberg is given a role which requires him to do what he does best – the all-American, Boston-twanged, everyman hero, yet he is a rather bland one – he is merely a cog in the law enforcement wheel and neither the character nor the actor seem to have a defining role in the action. Bacon and Goodman’s characters are just as thinly drawn yet both give the sort of solid support one would expect from character actors of their stripe.

While some of the supporting characters are given a decent amount of screen time to develop into someone we can actually care about – to wit, the young MIT Patrol Officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking) who overcomes his shyness to ask a student out on a date or J.K Simmons’ Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese who unwittingly ends up being a major protagonist in proceedings – others are mere cyphers, an ensemble of bombing victims.

Michelle Monaghan has a pretty thankless role as Clare, Tommy’s wife. Given she’s a nurse we expect to see more of her, but after weeping at the aftermath of the bombing, we see very little of her.

Melikidze and Wolff acquit themselves well as the brothers, yet not much focus is given to their motivation. The anger and disillusionment spelled out more clearly during a tough interrogation of the elder Tsarnaev’s wife by intelligence operatives.

It is no spoiler to mention that, unsurprisingly, the end credits feather a tribute to those who died and many who survived that tragic day. The poignancy of these moments only serve to underline that, worthy though the film is in reproducing the events, its protagonists deserved to be better served.