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by Peter J. O’Connell
Patriots Day. Released:
Jan. 2017. Runtime: 133 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence, realistically
graphic injury images, language throughout and some drug use.
On the eighteenth of
April in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now
alive
Who remembers that
famous day and year . . . .
--H.W. Longfellow,
“The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”
Paul Revere (and others) rode at night to warn Massachusetts
patriots that British troops were coming. The next day, April 19, 1775, the
patriots fought off the British at the battles of Lexington and Concord, thus
beginning the American Revolution. To guarantee that the events of April 1775
would not be forgotten, in 1894 Massachusetts established April 19 as an
official holiday, Patriots’ Day. In 1969 the observance of the holiday was
fixed as the third Monday in April. Since 1897 the Boston Marathon (named after
the battle of Marathon) has been held on Patriots’ Day as a link between
American and ancient Athenian struggles for freedom.
The events of April 15, 2013, and the following days will
also long be remembered, and not just in Massachusetts. On that day bombs were
set off by terrorists amid the crowd watching the Boston Marathon. Three people
were killed and hundreds seriously injured. A quest to determine the
perpetrators of the atrocity began immediately, and when their identities were
learned, a relentless manhunt was launched that eventually put the Boston area
into “lockdown.”
Now Peter Berg has co-written and directed Patriots Day, a film about these events.
Once more, as he did in Lone Survivor
(2013) and last year’s Deepwater Horizon,
Berg has cast Mark Wahlberg as a kind of working-class hero. Wahlberg’s
characters in the two previous films were based on real persons, but here, as
Tommy Saunders, he is a kind of composite cop, linking together the various
parts of the story. His performance is solid, as usual
The film begins in a somewhat familiar way with a mix of the
mundane—snippets from the lives of Tommy and those who will die in the
bombings—and the menacing—the preparations of their explosives by the
terrorists, the Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar
(Alex Wolff), Islamic refugees of Caucasus and Central Asian background. With
an accent and doctrinaire, Tamerlan, the older sibling, is the architect of the
plot. Dzokhar is more assimilated, seeming much like a slacker-type American college
student. The banality of his evil, in a sense, makes him an even more
frightening figure than his brother.
Suspense mounts as the Marathon proceeds, and the brothers
mingle in the crowd gathered near the race’s finish line. As Alfred Hitchcock
once famously pointed out, the suspense of knowing that a bomb has been planted
and waiting for it to go off is a more intense experience for an audience than
being startled by a completely surprising explosion. When the Tsarnaevs’ bombs
do go off, the carnage is horrifying. And the courage of both first-responders
and ordinary people is inspiring.
With Tommy’s help, checking of footage from surveillance
cameras identifies the Tsarnaevs as the bombers, and the massive manhunt for
them begins. Major figures in that hunt are FBI Special Agent Richard
Deslauriers (Kevin Bacon), Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman),
Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons) and Massachusetts
Governor Deval Patrick (Michael Beach). The actors bear fairly close physical
resemblances to the characters they portray.
For their part, the Tsarnaevs plan to go to New York. They steal
a car and kill an MIT cop (appealingly played by Jake Picking), but the police
are alerted to their whereabouts and pursue them. In the course of a ferocious
shootout--stunningly recreated by Berg—Tamerlan is wounded and then
accidentally run over by Dzokhar. Dzokhar escapes and finds a hiding place.
Governor Patrick places the city on “lockdown,” and in a chilling scene, a
purportedly Muslim police officer (Khandi Alexander, superb), in a hijab interrogates
Tamerlan’s wife (Melissa Benoist), also in a hijab, but cannot get any
information out of her. But eventually cops do confront Dzokhar.
Berg’s exciting and moving film ends with documentary
footage of such events as the recovery of injured bombing victims and the
participation of some of them in Boston Marathons since 2013, And, of course,
it depicts the now famous deep-felt, down-to-earth speech of Red Sox star David
Ortiz at Fenway Park on April 21, 2013. “This is our f-----g city, and nobody is
going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.” True words, whether for the
patriots of 1775, 2013, 2017 or the future America.
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