Patriot's Day Is Brought To You Courtesy Of the Red, White And Blue...And Messy Screenwriting

Peter Berg's track record as a director has more loop-de-loops than a rickety o'l rollercoaster. Hancock had a solid first half that deteriorated into a forgettable second half, Battleship was a complete misfire, Lone Survivor I barely even remember apart from thinking it wasn't very good but then there was last Fall's Deepwater Horizon, a taut, well-made disaster movie that actually showed some real craftsmanship in terms of creating tension on Berg's part. Was this a sign that he was finally becoming something more as a director, that o'l Peter Berg was about to really break out and become an auteur that would leave the shackles of Battleship and Hancock behind him?

Unfortunately, his newest film, Patriot's Day, seems to suggest, if anything, Deepwater Horizon was a major fluke, as this is yet another subpar effort from Peter Berg. Like Berg's last two movies with Marky Mark Wahlberg, Patriot's Day is based on a true event, this time the Boston Marathon Bombing from March 2013, a horrific event that we see through the eyes of numerous local residents. And I do mean numerous, this film is really wanting to be a sprawling portrait of so many different viewpoints and it gets more headache inducing rather than emotionally gripping trying to keep track of everyone in these opening sequences, especially since certain characters, like a cop played by J.K. Simmons, don't come into play into the actual plot until way late into the movie, and even then folks like that J.K. Simmon cop don't actually get to do all that much.

The scripts gaze may be spread far and wide across many different Boston residents but it's clear that the main character is a fictitious cop named Tommy Saunders, played by Mark Wahlberg. Saunders is a cop who wants to get a higher-ranking position in his job and feels like he could do more with his life and occupation than just being a quasi-crossing guard at a Boston Marathon. Then the bombs go off and suddenly he's able to stand up and be a part of something bigger than him. It's basically a rote cop movie plotline (the loose cannon rookie wants to prove himself and get results!), complete with an out-of-town high-ranking antagonistic figure for Tommy to butt heads with played by Kevin Bacon. We can tell this fellow is someone the audience should be rooting against because he raises concern about anti-Muslim backlashes if they release photos of two suspects behind the Bombings before they have names for the suspects. What an evil man, trying to follow "protocol" and "the rules!"

All of the stuff with Tommy's character is really just a slog, especially when it comes time for Wahlberg to deliver two monologues (one of them through tears) that are hampered by both poorly written dialogue and Mark Wahlberg's similarly low-quality delivery of these lines. Why on Earth stories from real-life people who were a part of this event are taking a backseat to this middling plotline is beyond me, especially since these sections of the movie try to full-on cop action movie by even shoehorning in some quippy one-liners or moments of levity (one Bostonite tosses a bat to the cops in the middle of a gunfight) that do not gel at all with the rest of the movies tone or atmosphere, they just come out of nowhere and disrupt any potential drama from really working.

When the focus shifts away from Tommy, Patriot's Day tends to improve a bit, most notably whenever it's centered on real-life people involved in this horrific tragedy. A father separated from his son in the midst of all this horrifying chaos feels like a plotline that could have been a way better plotline to center the movie around, while simialrly successful in recreating actual events in an intense series of sequences where a guy named Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang) is carjacked by the two wretched individuals behind the Boston bombing and held as their hostage. It's all edited and put together quite well and has a sense of intimate intensity that is indeed gripping and serves as a welcome small-scale departure from the rest of the features overly sprawling nature.

Unfortunately, this is only one brief part of the movie, and that means the solid camerawork seen here is the exception rather than the rule to the overall movie, which eschews the sharp and focused shot composition, framing and filming style of Berg's last movie, Deepwater Horizon, in favor of so many damn shaky handheld camera shots (a filming style incorporated a bit in Lone Survivor), it's like the movie is daring you not to get some form of motion sickness. Patriot's Day is a mixed bag when it comes to the practice filming even the most mundane shots in a coherent manner and it is similarly equivocal as a whole. It's a movie that earnestly wants to be a stirring tribute to the spirit of a great city but it also wants to shoehorn in a forgettable cop movie plotline that overwhelms the proceedings and just drags the entire motion picture down.