You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
How I felt leaving the movie theater after watching Act of Valor.
I’m not sure what to expect. Word on the street is: good movie. Great action. Lousy acting.
The movie is about Navy Seals preserving freedom around the globe. The film showcases the Seals incredible training, expertise and ability to kick ass from sea to shining sea.
The team jumps out of the back of an airplane. They swoop into their landing zone like nocturnal hawks, using stealth and guile to track a predator. When they land, it is quiet like a caterpillar tip toeing across a leaf.
The soldiers traverse jungles, launching a football sized drone into the sky like a paper airplane. Nicknamed the Raven, it flies above the team guiding them down a dangerous road.
Team members cross rivers, under water, clutching their rifles, holding their breath, rising like stealthy serpents. The Seals catch the body of a bad guy who has been sniped from hundreds of yards away. The target falls backward into a quiet embrace, only to be dragged underwater with hardly a sound.
There is no splash, no noise. The members pull the corpse under water with all of the disruption of the breeze. It is so peaceful, it is disturbing.
The seals race through an ocean, only to intercept a nuclear submarine that surfaces in the middle of nowhere. The men steer their Zodiac onto the back of the sub. Later they will pilot a mini sub to the coast of Somalia to watch an air field in the middle of the desert.
The hardware available to the Seal Team is limited only by tax dollars and the dreams of Pentagon generals who apparently use Rambo movies as a blue print for global domination.
The action scenes are fantastic because they are as real as it can be without actually killing someone. The Seal teams are real and the Seal training is live. How real are the battle scenes? They used real bullets. That’s right. Real bullets!
Thank God 90 percent of the movie is action because the other 10 percent is a reminder that these heroes are not actors.
No one will leave the theater wondering which Seal was played by George Clooney or Merril Streep.
Every movie needs a plot and this one is marginal. The fictional story focuses on Seal Team 7 saving a CIA agent who has information that leads to an international plot of terrorism.
The bad guys have developed an undetectable suicide vest that the terrorists plan to use in Vegas and S.F. and 14 other venues in the USA.
The SEALS missions take them from Central American jungles to secret compounds in Mexicali.
What you get is an angry ballet of ferocious military precision.
At each LZ, the fire fights are sensational, the action conducted with a controlled brutality. And all of it communicated with laconic grunts and realistic hand signals that mean nothing to the viewer, but apparently speak Encyclopedia Britannica volumes to these warriors surrounded by darkness and chaos.
According to the L.A. Times, the directors shot the action scenes in 50 days, over 2 years. That’s a crazy shooting schedule, but it is also what gives the movie authenticity and access that no film maker chronicling war has ever received.
When the soldiers do speak, the words seem forced. Essentially the dialogue seems soldier real, and that is the problem, it is soldier real. By Hollywood standards, it is awkward, and will never be confused with G.I. Jane. And that maybe be a good thing.
What’s fascinating to me as I watch is how much I learn about these men facing anonymous danger around the world.
While I am going through the drive thru at McDonalds, they are going through hell on Earth in a jungle fire fight. Whether I knew it or not, they are risking their ass for my right to eat that Big Mac.
Here’s the way the L.A. Times describes the film when dialogue becomes necessary.
Identified by first names only (security is the watchword here), the members of the film’s eight-man SEAL team exhibit palpable presence and calm self-confidence at all times.
So how did I feel?
I felt proud. I felt like clapping when the film ended, but I didn’t out of respect and for the sense of loss I just witnessed.
I thought about extraordinary men living anonymous lives fighting and dieing in the shadow of the American Flag. They do this selflessly so that me and you can go shopping in a mall and not get blown up by a bad guy we don’t even know exists.
While this film will never win an Oscar, it should win your heart as a reminder that Freedom is never free and is paid for with the blood and tears of highly trained men and women. These gallant warriors perform on the world stage in a theater of obscurity where the best reward is getting to come home in one piece.
And that is Crazy.